Back to School Challenge

This week, Create with Connie and Mary have this back to school challenge... crazy! Because I AM a teacher and am trying to mentally get ready to back to school.

To be fair, I have worked full time all summer doing data entry for my county's infants and toddlers (a shout out to all you over there who said you were reading my blog!) So I am not really ready to go back yet because of working all summer, AND I just took a week long course for the IB programme I am working with this year. That course was my inspiration for this cute card...

One of many big ideas from the class is the type of questions you ask students. They should be type 3 questions, questions with more than one right answer, questions that require students to really think critically, not just repeat facts.

So I was thinking that I wanted to come up with a totally new idea for this challenge. I pulled some sets to help inspire me. I was thinking of using that punch that makes the paper look like it's from a spiral notebook and drawing in the lines in real red and bashful blue to make it look like notebook paper the my students use. I also have a good friend who I work with that has a birthday right as we start school, so I wanted to make it a birthday card, AND that is when the IB class information combined with my teacher experience to produce this card. Let me tell you what I am thinking...

It is a bulletin board (remember those wavy boarder pieces teachers put up all around their bulletin boards? The scallop punch does a VERY good imitation of that!). Next, I used part of the phrase from the It's Your Birthday set. It is the question or prompt students need to answer, "Every year you grow..." It's the open ended question that I want my students to answer. Then the "student" creatively answered it with a drawing and the comment "...a little wiser" from the It's The Thought set. The paper is posted on the bulletin board, displaying the student's work (the brads are the push pins!) And, of course, the paper got a goal star for that answer. I don't think it shows up in the picture, but the owl's eyes have a thick coat of crystal effects. The message is perfect for my friend's birthday, too!

It's kind of funny to me that so much of the class inspired this card. And, yes, I am sending my instructor the link to this post of my blog! :)

My second card for this challenge is a modified take on a card that I made a few years ago (but it is still very cute!)

This card uses a basic black card base. Then in white ink I stamped A, B, and C from Whimsical Alphabet Upper and "thank you" from Wonderful Words.

Then I use the tab punch to punch out two Very Vanilla "apple cores." I draw in the center and seeds in Chocolate Chip, and I used the rounded edge of the punch to punch out the edge for the skins of the apples. (Punch once into the edge of the paper with just the rounded part of the tab punch. Then punch again, clipping off just the edge piece to make the skin on the apple.)

Next I punched a small strip of Chocolate Chip the same way described above to make a stem for each apple, and I used a circle of Old Olive to make a leaf for one apple.

Because of the black card stock, I like to use a white gel pen on the inside of the card. It makes it look more like a chalk board, but this time, I put a 4" x 5 1/4" piece of printer paper inside, and I stamped the apple from the Tart and Tangy stamp set.

Thanks for looking...