All of the Valentine's Day loot

Brought home a bunch of adorable little cards today and way too much candy. The cutest Valentine's Day treat came from one of the little boys. His mother got each of the teachers a box of Tazo "Calm" tea (prompting me to wonder what she has heard about the energy of our class) and a bag of homemade almond biscotti. The card on the front read "To my teacher". Very cute, and very much appreciated.

4 Hour Gift Tags

So I was at Target looking for small Valentine's Day gifts for my host teacher and classroom assistant and I found these cute little cookies. They're from a company called Emily's and they're dark chocolate covered fortune cookies with quotes and fortunes relating to friendship inside. They came in a nice little package and were $4 each. Sold.

I figured I would make little gift tags for them using my Cricut machine and call it a day. I already had the students' Valentines ready so that would leave me plenty of time to work on the lesson plans that are due this Thursday. Again, that was the plan. And since most of you reading this are either members of my family or have worked with me in an academic setting, you get that my plans don't always work out.
I don't know if anyone reading has ever owned a Cricut, but I will tell you that it is not always a cooperative machine. I have this theory that it was created by three, 55 year old women with limited knowledge of computers. I mean, that's really the only explanation. However, it (usually) does what it is supposed to and it does it pretty well. That is, if you take care of it properly and remember to replace the cutting mat every century or so. Honestly, you're supposed to replace the cutting mat every 3-4 months depending on how often you use the machine. I've had mine for well over 6 months and I've abused it. It's silly, really, considering a new one costs $3. But I just have to be a rebel. Needless to say, my paper would not stick to the cutting mat and the machine jammed about six times. Six. Take this image, then super-impose me banging my head against my textbook.

So what did I do? First, I ordered 4 new cutting mats off of amazon. They'll be here on Thursday. Then, I glue-sticked my paper down. Like a professional. I figured it was worth a shot, and it actually worked fairly well.
THEN I completely forgot that the Cricut does not just print out lettering ready to go. The middles of the O's and the A's and the D's and the B's had to be manually pasted once I pried them off of the cutting mat I had just glued them too. It was a lot of fun, and caused me to miss witnessing Cee-lo petting that mysterious white cat on The Voice.

Finally, at 9:30pm, 4 hours after beginning my gift tags, they were complete. And incredibly underwhelming. But they're finished and ready to give to my teachers tomorrow, so that's really all that matters.

I'm going to try not to DIY anything for the rest of the week. I have a long weekend coming up that should be filled with work, work, and more beautiful work. And possibly planning a new, ridiculous class project that my co-op will cringe at.

Valentine's Day Crayon Hearts

A couple of weeks ago I was clicking away on Stumbleupon when I came across this explanation on how to make heart-shaped crayons for your students. It looked simple enough, so I bought a silicone candy mold off of Amazon for about $8. I figure that I can use it again for crayons or candy. Then I went and grabbed some packs of crayons from the dollar store. I was able to get these 48 packs for $1 each, so I bought 5 packs.

Then came the task of peeling the wrappers off of the crayons. This was especially fun with dollar store crayons, because sometimes I would peel off one wrapper and find a Disney one underneath. One crayon wrapper was covered in Hebrew writing. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I don't question dollar store finds. I will say that peeling off the wrappers took much more time than I expected (about 2.5 hours) but it gave me something mindless to do while watching TV.

I separated the crayons into blues, greens, yellows dark purples, and grays and pinks, reds, oranges, light purples, and whites. I put the ugly browns, blacks, and puke greens to the side. Then I used kitchen scissors to chop the crayons up into small pieces.

I set the oven to 200 degrees and placed my crayons in the silicone mold. I made sure to place a baking sheet underneath to catch any drippings. If I was smart, I would have covered it in foil so that I didn't have to clean the pan later but, alas, I did not.

About 5 minutes later, I checked the mold and added crayons to the ones that had melted down. After a total of around 11 minutes, all of the crayons had melted down and they were ready to take out of the oven.

I then had to let the crayons cool. This took a very long time and I only had one mold, so the process became much longer than I had expected. Once the crayons were solid enough to move, I popped them in the freezer to speed up the cooling. Then I pushed them out of the mold one by one.

Eventually, I had a whole bunch of rainbow heart crayons ready to go.

I had created these little cards and expected to be able to glue the crayons right to the card. That's what I expected to do. I tried hot glue, to no avail. Then I tried Elmer's glue but that was a no go. So what did I do?

By this time, it was 2am. I was tired and out of wine and completely out of DIY adrenaline. I realized that I had some tiny plastic bags with hearts on them that I had grabbed at the dollar store, so I put one crayon of each color in the bags and stapled them to the cards. Stapled. Like a true professional.

In the end, I have to remember that my students are five and six year olds. They take what you give them, don't say thank you, and then destroy it. This particular group will destroy everything you love if you let them put their hands on it. So I don't exactly feel bad for stapling together their Valentines.