Mothers Day - success and fail!

This Mother's Day I was teaching in a class where I had the complete freedom to do whatever I wanted with the children. We didn't have a grand Mother's Day Tea or breakfast with mom's or a silly science fair. Mother's Day did sort of sneak up on me and I didn't think about it until the last week in April though. I'll remember in the future!

I decided to make a Handprint card with their picture.

"Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small,
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
But everyday I'm growing,
I'll be grown up someday,
And all these tiny handprints
Will simply fade away.
So here's a final handprint
Just so you can recall,
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small."

I had so much fun painting the children's hands! They would sit absolutely still - even a child that is extraordinarily hyper most of the time, but they almost all still wanted to hold control of their hands. When they relaxed and turned their hand so that I could brush paint on their little fingers- it tickled or was cold, etc. They watched with fascination as we made handprints. Most of them had to hold their hands out toward someone like Frankenstein as we went to the sink. "LOOK AT MY HANDS!"

Then came taking the pictures. Trying to find a place, taking several so that I could preview them later. I used photoshop and briefly adjusted the color and used a octagon crop before printing the. I did all the cutting of the pictures and the gluing.

Each card was beautiful. Their was a handprint in the upper right and left corners. The child's picture in the center and the handprint poem offset to the left or the right. I added a second piece of construction paper to add color and an additional frame that matched the paint.

I also did all the wrapping in tissue paper, and this is where I fail. If I'd set this up a week before it would have been such a perfect opportunity for the children to learn to wrap the presents for their moms themselves. The way that I was wrapping was very simple. One large piece of tissue paper. Another folded in half in the center. Card face down on the 2nd piece of tissue paper. Fold long sides. Fold short sides and tape. The children could have accomplished that. They SHOULD have made the cards that said "To MOM and from ...."

It would have been a great practical life exercise. They would have understood a complete cycle of work. Ah well, it is my own reflections and where I am as well. I practiced repetition and learned what I can do better as well!