Friday Fun

  Fridays are the best day of the week when you teach school.  Fridays are filled with a sense of anticipation of the weekend.  This year our speech schedule was super busy on Friday.  Lady A and I have vowed never to do that again.  Fridays are for fun.  On Fridays, you never know what may happen.
  Today I am going to share the Princess's latest thrift store find,  (Cue Macklemore singing "I'm gonna pop some tags.")  As I have said before we are big thrift store, dollar store, make it yourself people.  Whenever we are near a thrift store, we always stop in to check it out.  This past Tuesday we were in Goodwill when we found this gem.

You know this young lady, don't you?

   Olivia is the main character in a series of books written and drawn by Ian Falconer.  Princess loves Olivia because she is a pig after her own heart.  She loves to perform and her life is a vintage lover's dream.  Princess loves the vintagey colors and illustrations in Olivia books.

This is an Olivia theatre (Olivia would never spell it the American way too provincial.)  When you open it up it looks like this.

 

See this insert.

It had even more set backgrounds and characters.

     Indoor recess in third grade may never be the same.   Princess is in a quandary....should she laminate these pieces to keep them safe from grubby fingers?  Everything is a pretty hefty cardstock weight.  She is afraid laminating will take away from the muted tones. What do you think?

Oh and by the way, she paid a whopping $3 for this.  There is nothing like a thrift store find to make your heart soar.

Book Pals Part 3 -The Saga of a Turtle

Those little touches to a classroom often don't come cheap.  We have found  if you dig through those bins of stuffed toys in your local thrift store, you can find Book Pals for very very cheap.   After pricing Book Pals online, (anywhere from $15- $50) we decided to try and recreate them.  See our Fancy Nancy here and our Pete the Cat here.  While out recently, we were looking for stuffed characters we could adapt and re-purpose for pals when we came across these friends.

That's the dinosaur from How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (among other sequels.)  Next is Thing 1 from Cat in the Hat.  He is sitting next to Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham.  On his left is Franklin the Turtle.  Finally there is a dinosaur that we do not know the name.  He looked familiar and he is a Kohl's for Kids creature which is usually a book pal. Any ideas of the book?  We didn't pay over $1.50 for any of them.  WooHoo!

   So we first found this guy at a Goodwill.  We thought he looked just like Franklin without a hat.  We thought we could create a hat for him.  We were sure we had found our Franklin.

  Then we stopped at another Goodwill and found this guy.

   What were we thinking???  We hang our heads in shame.  How can we call ourselves book lovers when we make this kind of mistake???  They look NOTHING alike.  

   So now we have this unnamed turtle.  Maybe we can find a rabbit and then we will have the characters from The Tortoise and the Hare.  Despite our confusion, we still think we scored big in our search for book characters.  What do you think?

Queen Pea and Princess Kay

Book Pals- Pete the Cat

  We have just made our second book pal and we are in love.  If you haven't read the picture book series Pete the Cat  by Eric Litwin and illustrated by James Dean, you are missing out.  To get an idea, click on the books and rock away.  Just imagine a class of first graders singing away...you will fall in love too.

    We knew we wanted to create Pete, but weren't sure we what to do about shoes.  We thought we might find infant shoes at a thrift store, but no luck.  Then we found these at Marshall's.  Perfect!

   We dug some blue fabric out of the fabric scrap box.  It was a little dark, but we thought it would work.  Queen Pea just cut it out by eyeballing it.  She is so good, she only had to re-cut the head twice.  The eyes and nose were from felt and the mouth and eyebrows were black floss.  My job was the stuffing the body.  I love the final result.

  Now there is a third book out.  Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons.  I am trying to get the Queen to make a coat with four buttons, but she says I can't have everything.  Sometimes mothers are so mean!

Princess Kay

Book Pals - Fancy Nancy

I was an avid reader as a kid and being a teacher just gives me an excuse to buy books. For the last three years, I have been collecting books for my future classroom. Goodwill has been my best resource. My class library numbers close to 500 now. The Queen says I have to stop, but who can pass up a copy of The Watsons Go to Birmingham -1963 when it is lying there begging to be read and loved. Besides looking for books, I have been on the lookout for plush book characters for my favorite books. You can buy them, but my bank account cannot handle the prices. My current favorite picture book is Fancy Nancy.

I think that Fancy Nancy is what I was as a child. I loved nothing better than dressing up in as many ruffles and bows as I could pile on. As a teacher, I love Fancy Nancy for her wonderful way of choosing extraordinary words to say ordinary things. So of course the first character I wanted was Nancy.

Amazon Version $33.00

Queen Pea was sure we could create Fancy Nancy ourselves. She bought these dolls at Goodwill for 25 cents each.

We took the legs off one doll and attached them to another. We took purple tulle and hot glued on a dress. Then we accessorized. Beads, ribbon, jewels and a boa (a ribbon that we gathered). The glasses are made from craft foam and colored cellophane. Everything we used was from our craft junk drawer. I love the final product.

Total cost...50 cents! Stayed tuned for our next book pal project...Pete the Cat.

Princess Kay

P.S. News on the job front. I will be teaching third grade next year. Woohoo!