This year I am teaching a community based special education class. It's about half and half kids with IEPs and typical peers. There are 2 teachers, Jen and me, and 2 aides. So far, I am loving it!!
We debated on a theme: ocean, jungle, dinosaur? We could not decide and after leaving Lakeshore with jungle themed decor, we still were not excited about it. While browsing Pinterest, Jen started seeing a lot of really cute "Pete the Cat" boards made. I only found 1 website I could buy "Pete the Cat" classroom decor! I knew I would have to get crafty and make a few things.
Back in the day, my mom made all of her bulletin boards so I knew just the right person to go to!! We had borrowed her friends overhead projector (yes, those still exist!!) for our baby room, which I'll post later.
I printed off a cover of a "Pete the Cat" book and traced it on an overhead projector sheet with a black sharpie. I blew the image up on the wall to the size that I liked and traced the whole thing with pencil onto blue butcher paper. From there, I took the colors that I needed for the eyes, guitar, shoes, etc and traced it (like my mom is doing in the picture). 
I cut out each thing I traced and glued it onto the blue butcher paper where I had originally traced the whole picture. It was quite time consuming and was hard to be excited about when it was all glued on. All you could see were floating images of yellow eyes, guitar, and shoes. It had taken me over an hour and I just felt "ehh" about it. 
After everything was glued on, I cut around the whole picture. What a difference that made!! I could finally see the "Pete the Cat" that I had been working so hard on!! Something was still missing though.. My mom told me the trick is to trace everything in black once you are all done.
The next task was getting him laminated. I am very picky on my lamination.. If I worked this hard on it, I didn't want the thin, cheap lamination that half the time peels up (like my school uses). One of my aides (and really GOOD friends), Natalie, took it to to Lakeshore to laminate, but he was TOO WIDE!! He wouldn't fit. She took him to Office Max, still TOO WIDE!! She finally went to Kinkos and they had a wide enough machine to laminate him. We paid for it, but SO WORTH IT!
He looks pretty stinkin' cute up in the classroom, especially next to the ADORABLE border we bought.
We needed more things up in our GIANT classroom! We didn't have our class rules up. We had found a "Pete the Cat" Whole Body Listening on Pinterest (warning: when you click on the actual pin, it brings you to a website that isn't the picture of the pin). Jen had found a similar rules pin for a Mr Potato Head . We modified both of them into this. We made it a whole-group learning the rules activity and the kids got to stick the words to his body in the correct spot. After both our AM and PM got their turn, we put him on the wall where everyone could see it.
The last "Pete the Cat" board was made by my mom. I can't take credit for her famous stuffed heads!! I don't know how she makes them in like 10 minutes!! She cuts out the butcher paper, glues on eyes, nose, and whiskers, staples around and started stuffing tissue paper in it. We put up the matching blue butcher paper on our board, used our cute border we bought, made some legs, and stapled his head up to corner to make the board his body. Our kids never walk by this board so we don't put a lot on it, but it is super cute for all the kindergarteners to see on a daily basis.
She is seriously AMAZING at these!! She's made farm animals, monkeys, bees, mice, pretty much anything you want!!
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