The Classroom Tree in Spring Mode

Well, believe it or not, we are seeing definite signs of spring here in California.  Just today I broke off a couple of twigs from trees and took them in the classroom to show the Little People how new leaves were coming out of the leaf buds.

With onset of spring in mind, I spent some time wandering in the Dollar Tree today trying to find a way to make our classroom tree look spring-ish.  I wanted it to have flowers (since it's supposed to be an apple tree, after all), but since I didn't give the tree flowers last year, I didn't have anything already planned or stored away for this look.

I went into the store thinking I might look at the bunches of artificial flowers with the goal of pulling the flowers off of the plastic stems and sewing them together on the sewing machine to make a flower garland.  However, it quickly became apparent that it would take a lot of bunches of flowers to make any significant amount of garland.

But then at the front of the store I saw them:  "Wedding" flower garlands

Each package had 12 feet of garland.  Each white flower was separated with what appears to be a piece of clear drinking straw.  Now that I think about it, this idea could easy to be replicated at home, but certainly not for the cost of a dollar.

 And certainly not for $.50 each, which is what they rung up for when I took my eight garlands up to the cash register.

After school I began to drape the flowers up on the tree.  I actually thought I got all eight strands on there, but then after I was finished I  found one more strand that I had not put up yet.  Then I went back to the Dollar Tree after school and bought 11 more strands. (I was a little worried that they had changed the price to a dollar in the three hours that I was away, but hooray, they had not.)

Here is the tree in the first stage of its spring look.  As you can see, seven garlands hardly made an impact on the tree at all, but adding 12 more tomorrow should do the trick.

I wasn't really sure how to string the flowers up so I just randomly tried a few methods as I went along.  However, after I was finished I could tell that I didn't like this "wraparound" method shown below...

...as much as the "group and clump" method shown here at the far end of these branches.

 So tomorrow I'll be doing lots of "grouping and clumping", which of course are highly technical tree-decorating terms.

As you can see in the picture above, the garlands did have other things on them.  They came as both flowers and holographic hearts, or holographic doves, but I went for the hearts.  I took them off the garland and then added them to the Valentine's creative art center that was a choice today:

Actually, I almost feel like just the cool silver hearts were worth the $.50 alone.  I think I'll take the ones that they don't use on their art and put some of my blank yard sale address labels on them and put them in the writing center for Valentine's Day cards.

So, a tree's worth of apple blossoms, plus over 100 large holographic hearts to use for various purposes for only $9.50.   Not a bad deal at all.