"And The Oscar Goes To..."

I volunteered to help with Art City Elementary School's Teacher Appreciation Week and was given the assignment of decorating the faculty room and outside doors of the school.  This was a fun and refreshing change from doing mostly donation collections the year before, and who wouldn't love working with a theme like "Our Teachers are Stars!"

I guess the PTA had done a similar theme in the past because in the closet there were decorations and props like movie set clipboards, film cans, and reel cameras.  I was also more than grateful to reuse the centerpiece cans that were made for last year's decorations.  I only added the yellow tissue paper and one (of the many found in the closet) Oscar-like plastic trophy.  Throw in some large stars cut out of butcher paper, and it's SHOWTIME! 

On one of the afternoons during the week, the PTA provided the teachers and staff with a snack bar.  We fired up the faculty popcorn machine and set up a concession stand, too.  I thought it was a really cute touch.

Now here's where my plans got a little carried away.  I envisioned, as part of the decorations, a wall of "Now Showing" movie posters, each encased in their own light-up frames.  In theory, it was a super-awesome idea.  In practice, it was...well, okay.  I had taken foam poster-board and cut it into the frames that had an 8.5 x 11 inch opening, allowing for me to put in a picture of a movie poster that had been Photoshopped to include faces of faculty members.  All along the edges of the frames, I punched holes and pushed white Christmas lights through.  My mistake was in keeping the lights strands between the four frames connected.    The posters looked really cool when they were lit up, but halfway through the week, one of the strands burned out and it ended up looking a little "ghetto."  But, here they are all lit up (you can see how they were hanging on the wall in the picture of the entire room above):

And finally, I would like to "show and tell" about my large, mural artworks.  As it turns out, all of those Saturday mornings as a child watching Bob Ross paint "happy little trees" finally paid off, though for me, it was "happy little clouds and bushes."  I was really stoked about how the Hollywood sign turned out, with its three-dimensional quality given by the letters cut out of foam board.  I'm pretty sure I was feeling inspired by my recent California trip.

I had carefully pre-measured all of the doors and and bulletin boards so I could cut the paper to size and paint everything at home.  I think my family was relieved when I got all of these decorations off of the living room floor and out of the house.  I was relieved that when I assembled them, they looked like I had hoped they would.  I was particularly excited about the subtlety in colors and design that made the front door look like an inviting and unmistakable introduction of the week's theme to all who entered the school.

"That's a wrap!"

This post authored by Amber