Teacher Appreciation Week: Decorated Lunch Room

I decorated the lunch room for the teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week (take a look here to see what I did to the lunch room last year). I try to spend as little as possible on this since it's money from the kids.

When I subbed as an assistant in the gifted class last year, the kids made Icosahedron Christmas Card Ornaments (The Quilted Turtle has a tutorial on this). Heather Bailey took it one step further and made a topiary out of it (she calls it a Paper Globe), and she offers a free, down loadable pattern (To see her topiaries go here, and to see her Valentine's Day globes, go here). Basically, you cut out 20 circles, score triangles in the middle, and glue them together in a certain order. To make my life easier, I bought a 2, 3/4" circle paper punch which worked almost perfectly with the triangle in Heather Bailey's pattern. Since I had a lot of circles to score, I cut a triangle out of a plastic butter lid to guide me. I got the bright pots at Ikea for $.99 each.

I like to use paper lanterns because they really fill the space and make an impact. I got the idea to put butterflies on them from Martha Stewart. She has a template for the butterflies. I cut a few out while waiting on soccer and archery practice.

At the end of the week, we give away the pots and topiaries to the teachers. Last year, we gave away the sunflower arrangements.

The blue scrapbook paper I used had a white swirly pattern on it, so I copied that with pipe cleaners and glued butterflies at the end.

I got these cheap trellises from Ikea ($3.99 I think), painted them white and glued butterflies flying up and around them.

I stuck a few of these leftover pots on the food buffet table. The only thing that disappointed me was the flowers. For some reason the flower selection in town this year is pretty lame. And after cutting out 50,000 butterflies and circles, the room felt to me a bit like a scrapbook threw up on it. But really, I think it turned out well.