The Pursuit of “Hoppy”ness.

Many teachers have a theme or “thing” that defines their classroom. For the room next door it is turtles, down the hall it’s cats, across the way it’s the ocean. Lots of times there is some alliteration like Smith’s Stars or Davis’ Dogs. I don’t have a thing – except I like my room to be neat (which probably doesn’t count). So one year while I was frantically stocking up on everything I needed (and many things I didn’t need) from the local teacher store, I saw that there was a line of frog products from stickers to name plates to decorations to notepads. Now, I don’t like frogs and probably if I saw one would steer clear, but there’s something about Carson-Dellosa because they make everything look happy.

So I loaded up my cart with all the frog essentials and decided my welcome to kindergarten display would be called “I’m very HOPPY you’re here!” I bought two big frogs and a bunch of smaller frogs for each child’s name to go in the “pond.” If I had been thinking, tadpoles would have been cuter, but I’m not sure most kids would have gotten the joke. (Actually, some of my parents probably wouldn’t have either.)

Before school began I worked on my welcome display, which as I've mentioned, is one of my favorite parts of the year. I made a cute pond from blue bulletin board paper and then cut green paper in a circle around the blue "pond" to look like grass and flowers. Inside the pond were some lilly pads and fish. I placed the two big frogs on the lilly pads and put mine and my assistant’s names on each one and then the new kindergartners names on the little frogs.

I did like the display, but the frog theme never caught on for me in the room. That’s OK; in fact I’m a little “hoppy” it didn’t! (Sorry – had to)