Make Your Own Preschool Morning Board

I had this light bulb moment... maybe I can get the kids into a "school mode" if I engage them with something like this pocket chart to start the day.  Most classrooms start with a circle time and something similar right?  So let's give it a try.  

HOLD THE PHONE!!!  I don't have the money to drop on one of those fancy pantsy pocket charts! $50 for a good one.... $70 for an awesome one.  No way.  I am much too frugal.

So I made my own, (didn't see that coming did ya?  oh, you did?  yeah I figured).

I got a piece of foam poster board and calendar pieces from the Dollar Tree, bulletin board trim for $1 at Target, and a weather wheel for about $.60 on clearance in Walmart (but that is easily DIY too).  

The most expensive part of this was buying velcro for all the calendar pieces.

I covered the board with leftover pieces of felt, piecing together different colors to represent different circle time topics.  

Dark blue on top is all about the day.

Light blue is sight words for the week.  This is an experiment.  Not sure if he is ready for this at 3 1/2, but he's bright, so we'll see how it goes.

Green is for the letter and number of the week.  We will use worksheets from various activity books that correspond to these after we finish with our morning board gathering.

I got sick of cutting velcro squares for every piece, plus the word cards are double sided, so I opted to use clothes pins here...as if you couldn't tell.

The whether wheel is self explanatory.  It's actually my kid's favorite part.  He loves looking out the window and moving the arrow.  I did have to add velcro pieces to the arrow and each "slice" so that gravity would stop declaring every day "snowy".... we've got a heat warning going on here for Pete's sake! 

I used a hot glue gun around the edges of felt, now that it's all said and done I might have used something like Hi-Tack all purpose glue to adhere the entire piece of felt so it doesn't pull away from the board as you remove the velcro pieces from it.

The only thing left to do is decided whether I am going to mount it onto some wall space (shout out to command strips...holla!!!) or attach some ribbon to the top so I can move it around and hang it on door knobs or nails or whatever is nearby in whatever room we find ourselves in.

Now I just hope we use it!