Celebrating the Birthday of the USA!

As someone who has always worked on a traditional school calendar, it was a new experience for me when I moved south and learned that some schools operate on a year round calendar. Of course, students don’t actually go to school year round, but schools are basically open the entire year. With many of the year round schools gearing up for the start of school and the Fourth of July around the corner, I dug through some of my favorite patriotic crafts to share.

For Memorial Day I modified a craft I had found on Enchanted Learning. The craft is a flag windsock (which the kids love to play with all the way home – in fact, I’m not sure how many actually made it home in one piece). The Enchanted Learning website recommends you use a cylindrical oatmeal container for the “body” of the windsock, however I could never get my hands on 25 oatmeal containers at the same time. Instead I take a piece of 12” x 18” construction paper for each child. They cut out white stars and glue them on the front of the blue paper. Then they turn the blue paper over and glue one end of several white and red party streamers strips (1 ½ to 2 feet long) to the bottom (long) part of the blue paper. When they finish, I staple the two short ends of the paper together to make a cylinder (the body of the windsock). Now the red and white streamers hang in a circle from the bottom of the windsock. Then I punch a hole on either side of the windsock and the student ties a piece of red yarn between the two holes so the windsock can be hung up and displayed. As I said before, easily one of the favorite take-home projects of the year.

Another fun (and educational!) craft is the Lady Liberty hat. After living in New York, the Statue of Liberty is one of the most exciting landmarks to see and visit. After teaching my students about the Statue of Liberty and why she is such an important symbol for our country, we make our own Lady Liberty hats. Instead of green though, we make ours from red, white, and blue construction paper. Each child starts with a blue band, cut from a 12” by 18” piece of construction paper. You can either make the band even all the way around or make it crescent moon shaped (with the “fat” part for the front) like Lady Liberty’s hat. Then each child cuts out long triangles from red and white paper to represent Lady Liberty’s peaks on her hat. Students can also cut out white stars or letters to spell out words like, ‘USA’ or ‘America’ or ‘Liberty’ on the blue band to really show their patriotic spirit.

Side Note: After writing this, I actually looked on the internet and it looks like another way to make a Statue of Library crown is by using paper plates to make the band and the points. Although most of these crafts then painted the crowns green like the original, you still could paint them red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July. Happy Birthday America!

America's Stars

Flag Day is June 14th each year. As a kid I remember sweating through Flag Day ceremonies in elementary school and listening to third graders play America on their recorders. It always meant summer was a few days away!

To celebrate the American Flag, our class makes a display for the hallway. We use bulletin board paper to create the red stripes and then use white sentence strips for the white stripes. On the white strips, we use interactive writing to create sentences describing things we love about our country and why America is special. For the 50 stars, each child cuts two white stars from construction paper. Then I take each child's photo and they glue their picture on one of their stars. We then place the stars on the blue bulletin board paper and place it on the flag to complete the display. The display is titled America's Stars!

As a special treat for Flag Day we also make a yummy cake. At the start of the day we mix a basic cake mix together and place it in a rectangular baking pan. We then place it in a large toaster oven to bake. After the cake cools, we frost the cake with vanilla icing. Then we place blueberries to represent the blue part of the flag and strawberries in rows to make the stripes. There are tons of pictures of this cake online and you can see some here. It is always a refreshingly sweet and almost healthy way to end Flag Day. Yum!