Day 2 - Wrapping Paper

It's Day 2 of the December School Day Photo Challenge!

Day 2 - Wrapping Paper

Well, this one is kind of obvious.  Wrapping paper makes great bulletin board background paper!  The picture up top shows a bulletin board a fellow teacher made using shiny, blue wrapping paper as her background.  With so many dollar stores around, getting wrapping paper for any occasion doesn't have to cost a lot.  Plus, you can customize it for almost any holiday or season.

The bottom half of the picture shows wrapping paper used to cover textbooks.  One things for sure, kids won't mix-up whose book it is when the wrapping papers can be so distinct.

One idea I had for wrapping paper and school comes from the idea of wrapping 25 different Christmas books as a countdown to Christmas.  Your child gets to pick one a night, unwrap it, and have it read as their bedtime story that night.  This would so easily apply to school!  Think of those last couple of weeks of school.  You could wrap ten books that have summer themes in summery wrapping paper.  Put them all in a basket and have a student pick one book to unwrap each day for a read aloud.  You could do this for Halloween, too.  Wrap Halloween themed books and put them in one of those plastic cauldrons you can also usually pick up at the dollar store. The kids could open and read one a day to countdown to Halloween. Actually, it would work for any holiday or event where you want to do a countdown of some sort.  It is a total hook to get them into a book, and who doesn't like to unwrap a gift?!  If you have certain books you want to read on certain days, you could number them rather than having the kids randomly pick.

                                               

Picture source

The picture above is from the Clean Mama blog.  She has a great site (not an education blog, but more homemaking) where she offers a free download of the numbers shown in the picture above. She also explains how she does a Christmas Advent countdown with books.  As a person who loves things to be organized, I love that she also has lots of tips for organizing pretty much everything!

So, back to wrapping paper and school. . . here are a couple of other quick ideas for using wrapping paper in school.

• Line the back of your bookshelves with strips of wrapping paper using some double stick taper for a pop of color.
• Wrap a few books from your class library that you know are great reads but have uninviting covers.  As much as we say don't judge a book by its cover, you know they do!  Cover a few of the books like the textbooks above are covered. Put them in a basket with a sign that says, "Don't Judge a Book by its Cover!" and encourage your friends to try one.  If you wanted, you could even write the title and a brief description on an index card, and tape it to the cover. This would be a chance to sell the book in a quirky or funny way.

Okay, that's all I have for wrapping paper!  If you have any ideas, please feel free to share in the comments.