School Celebration

In our little playgroup of ten kids, four of them start preschool between August 24th and September 6th.  For three of them (including ZB), it's their first time at preschool, so of course I had to throw a School Celebration party!

I asked ZB what sorts of things she wanted to do at preschool and she gave me a cute list - eat snack, dance, play freeze tag, and make new friends.  I decided to take her "goals" and turn them into a cute banner.  I trimmed some classic draw & journal newsprint to fit the biggest sheet my laminator can handle and used scrapbook stickers to write out ZB's goals for preschool.  Then I strung up a piece of baker's twine (the heavy stuff for cooking, not the fancy stuff for decorating) and used clothespins to attach the signs.

Inspired by this tutorial by Heather Bailey,  I used her pattern and instructions (I used my glue gun instead of a glue stick, however) to make apples to hang above the table.  I cut the leaf and stem out of cardstock and hot glued them into the top of the paper globe before I finished it.  I also ran some ribbon through the top and tied a knot to make the apples hang.

I made these smaller balls using a 2-1/2" circle punch and just eyeballed an equilateral triangle on my template for the fold lines.  It worked just fine.  I tied knots along the ribbon to keep the globes spaced out and then just assembled them around the ribbon.

A note for the impatient - you should probably avoid this project.  It is SUPER time-consuming and tedious. It does give you a cute hanging centerpiece like this that your friends will gush over, however:

I made the centerpiece for the table using this tutorial from Happy Clippings as my starting point.  I used yellow pencils, markers and all the cute colors from a box of 64 crayons.

What's the use of having a party if you can't make goody bags?!?!  I started off my creating these bags for Smarties.  I scanned a piece of that good old school paper, found a free clipart apple on Google, then created these in Photoshop.  I could get two bag toppers out of one 5x7 photo and I had a 50% off coupon code for the Walgreens photo center.

I paired the Smarties with a cute back-to-school note pad from the Target Dollar Spot:

Then I stuck them in bags I made a few months ago when I was selected to host an Expo Washable Marker House Party.  The kids all took home a dry erase board and two sets of Expo markers, too!  I love House Party!

I whipped up some yummy food for the moms and ordered pizza for the kiddos.  All-in-all, this was a great party and everyone had a great time!