Winter Blues feat. Diet Coke

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We’re at that point in the school year that just everyone is over it. The kids are getting burnt out, the teachers are getting burnt out, and the parents are getting tired of their kids being all cranky. It’s like they can smell how close summer is! We’ve been cooped up inside for almost two weeks now, and just about everyone is about to burst!

Even my classroom has started feeling dark and dingy with these super cold winter days. I feel sluggish and uninspired! I’ve been complaining for weeks that something always feels off… I don’t have my normal mojo when it comes to planning activities and changing things in the classroom. I’m definitely solidly stuck in a slump!

This Monday we had a snow day, and while I enjoyed the day off, it really got me thinking about sprucing things up around me. I don’t know about you, but I am SUPER affected by my environment. If there are dirty dishes in the sink when I get home, it’s five hundred times harder for me to get the motivation to cook. Being cooped up with 13 rambunctious preschoolers in one room is really taking it’s toll! It’s crazy how much of a difference one hour outside makes, but boy does it change the day. At the end of the day when they are gone, I feel like I’ve ran a marathon and I don’t want to do anything! The snow day ended up being a huge blessing because I realized that I needed to tidy my room up more and make some changes to make our room a better (and more fun!) place to be in.

Preschool is all about fun right? 🙂 My first order of business was incorporating some fun and bright colors around the room. I started with my most uninspired part of our classroom – the science area! Winter definitely isn’t the most fun season for the science area… most plants are dead. We are lucky to have a peace garden right behind our school so I packed the kiddos up and we went on a nature winter walk to see what was left! Surprisingly, there were a lot of cool dried flowers and plants still left. The kids of course thought they were beautiful, semi-dead or not! 😉 The beauty of being a child, any other time and I would have passed these by without a second thought.

We gathered all of our beautiful items inside and they were a hit! Because they were dead, they were fragile though. While I was at Kroger picking up kosher marshmallows for our rice krispies activity next week, I grabbed a few really fun glass Diet Coke Bottles that I saw on display. I love Diet Coke and I was excited to see their new bottles that had so many colorful designs! Out of the whole display there were no duplicates at all. I had a fun time looking through them all and choosing ones that I thought were the prettiest! I personally love drinking from glass so I scooped up a few of these limited editions before they were gone! As a bonus, I decided to upcycle them for our science/nature area in the classroom to hold our fragile finds from outside. The kids loved all of the patterns on the bottles and more importantly… they were super excited to recognize the Coca Cola brand and read the words on the bottles! Quite a few were excited to share that their mommies and daddies drink that at home too. 🙂

Sprucing things up has really given me the kick in the butt I needed to feeling more productive. I can’t wait to see what learning is in store for the rest of this winter! I’m still hoping for an early spring, but winter isn’t so bad after all. 😉