Pumpkin Posts

So it has been an insanely long time since I blogged last.  Many things have changed since last spring.  My little man turned one along with my baby girls having an awesome 3rd birthday.  My eldest is now a  big SK and the hubby and I had a great trip to Europe.  The biggest day to day change we have had is that I have returned to work part time.  I am now teaching a great JK/SK group on Mondays, Wednesdays and some Fridays. This has changed slightly what this blog will look like.  I will hopefully continue to do many of the things I have done in the past but I also am going to try and share some of my Kinder adventures.

As both a teacher and a parent I am not a fan of keeping excess kids crafts.  Kaitlyn on the other hand has become a pack rat wanting to keep every drawing, note, and tiny craft that she does, and she does a lot of them.  I love that she is creative but there is a limit to what I can keep. I work on the philosophy that the parents of my students feel the same way and with this in mind I decided that for Halloween we would create something that parents may want to keep and bring out every Halloween – then came the pumpkin posts.  The idea came from a link from the Sunday Showcase to a blog featuring DIY Punkin’ Heads.  I approached both of the other Kindergarten teachers in my school and we agreed that this would be great craft for all three classes to do – it also helped that we were studying pumpkins.

I started by enlisting the help of my amazing father who helped me purchase the fence posts and the paint and then cut and sanded ALL 56 of them for me!  We purchased two fence posts 4″ and 5″ in diameter and he had a left over 6″ in his barn from a previous use.  I found out later that I probably could have gotten some used ones from a local ginseng farmer (something to keep in mind for next time).  He cut them a variety of lengths from approximately 6″ to 8″ long.  I wanted them all different as in a pumpkin patch pumpkins are all different.  After this I enlisted the help my Kaitlyn (who’s class would be doing these as well) to help me prime all the pumpkins.

Fortuntately is was a very mild fall day so we were able to paint outside.

We took the posts to school and over 3 days each student painted their post orange.

We all knew the challenging part was going to be the faces so we enlisted the help of our Big Buddies.  In my class the big buddies helped the Kinders by drawing on the face in pencil and then with very small paint brushes the Kinders painted the faces black.  I hot glued on the top of each post a bit of raffia, a pipecleaner stem and some ivy for leaves.  I think they turned out pretty great!