Back To School!

It's almost that time! In a little over a week my kids will be starting another year of school (YAY!!). Every year I try and make the first day special for them. I start with a special breakfast and I decorate the dining room with back to school decorations. The back to school fairy even comes and brings the kids a special treat. Click HERE for some fun breakfast ideas you could do!

 For their lunches, I try to make them cute and fun by labeling their food with cute little stickers or sayings and I add a special note to them. Click HERE for some fun lunch ideas!

When they come home from school, I give them an after school snack. Usually it's something healthy but on this day I give them a special treat. Most of the time it's cookies or cupcakes. Click HERE for snack ideas.

And for dinner they get to choose. Usually it's been fun pasta or pizza. Click HERE for some dinner ideas.

I wanted to share some of the things I made and add some of the tutorials I found to give you some ideas of what you could do :)

 

I found a cute tutorial for these backpacks on Inking Idaho's website. They're the perfect size to fill up with little goodies. These backpacks are filled with fun little erasers, backpack & lunch bag tags, hand sanitizer from Bath & Body that say Smart Cookie, and some fun candy. Here is the link to Inking Idaho's website for the backpacks. I loved them so much that I made my niece and nephews a backpack also.

I found another backpack tutorial that I tried and I liked but It was just a little too small for what I wanted to do with it. But here is the link to that free tutorial. It's at Sarah's Ink Spot Blog.

 

I was on the Lauren McKinsey website and she had an adorable back to school collection that I just had to get. I love her work and I just had to purchase some of her back to school printables. My kids will be starting preschool, third grade, and fifth grade this year so her collection worked out great for me!

 

These are the large circles that I printed form the Fifth Grade Collection. I just cut them out and put them on a Tim Holtz ball chain. I did that for each backpack.

 

 

This is another Lauren McKinsey printable. These ones I made for my niece and nephews.

 

These are pencils that I tied together with a ribbon and added a Lauren McKinsey editable printout. I got the pencils for the dollar bins at Target.

 

These candy Rolo pencils were so fun and easy to put together. I found a great tutorial on youtube that I followed. The ones I packaged are for the teachers. I still need to package one more :)

 

Here is the video from Scrappin With My Bug:

 

This is a banner that I made to hang in the dining room. I made this using the CTMH cricut cartridge Art Philosophy for the banner and for the apples I used the Create A Critter cartridge. For the word SCHOOL I used my silhouette to cut out the letters.

 

 

I made this last year to put on the table so I thought I'd use it again. I found this vase and wood holder at Safeway a few years ago in the floral section. So I painted it and decorated it with some printouts that I purchased from the Paper Glitter Shop.

These are what I made last year for the kids from the "Back To School Fairy." They were buses that you print out and put together. You can also edit them and add a special message along the sides. I got these at the Paper Glitter Shop as well.

These tags are from the Lauren McKinsey website. I made them for the kids backpacks and lunch bags. I laminated them with name badge tags I got from Walmart.

 

These lunch box notes are also from Lauren McKinsey. I'm going to laminate them that way they'll last longer. They're avalible for girls, boys, and teens!

 

These are the place mats I made using the Krylon Chalkboard spray and a place mat from the dollar store.

 

I made utensil holders using half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and taping the sides together with double sided sticky tape to create a pocket.  

 

These are last years first day of school pictures of the kids. The grade signs are a free printable I found on a website. Click HERE for the website.