Tot School

After pining over Carisa's Bottle Top Name Thingies (I can't remember what she calls them), I decided I was going to make some. The only problem is that our family no longer drinks bottled water. I wish I could say it was due to the new movement toward reusable drinking containers. It's actually because we're on a budget now and that's just one of the sacrifices we made to save a few dollars each week.

Anyway...I have been trying to figure out a way to get these things done without the use of bottle tops. And ya'll all know how I like to TWEAK things a little! So...I tried making my own sentence strips, and they didn't look all that great. (I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, and just couldn't handle the paper being a little crooked on one end). I thought about just going to my favorite teacher's resource store (The Tardy Bell in Texarkana, TX) for premade sentence strips, but I thought that would negate the whole idea of saving money, so I came up with this idea. I still like the bottle top idea better, though, because they are easier for Lindsay to pick up and they look like they would stay put a little better once placed on the paper. But I do like my version too, because since I used a full size sheet of paper, I could place it all in a sheet protector and store it in a little binder. I plan to make these for each member of our family. She really enjoyed playing with them today for Tot School.

All I did was get out some of my old unused 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbook paper, my square punch, some glue dots, a sheet protector, and a permanent marker. I punched out enough squares for her name in the purple paper and wrote the letters of her name on each one. Then I punched out the same number of squares on the top of the coordinating flowery paper. I then mounted the flowery paper to a piece of green cardstock (I used a whole sheet for stability, but one could certainly use an appropriately sized backing strip as well), and wrote the letters of her name in green squares. Then I mounted a photo of her (from last spring - I haven't actually printed a picture in quite a while - I know, I'm horrible) on to another piece of green cardstock. Then I slipped the whole thing into a sheet protector, and gave her the purple letter squares.

There are lots of other great Tot Tools on Carisa's blog: 1+1+1=1...go check it out!