Treasure Box #BacktoSchoolWeek

How much fun are you having with #BacktoSchoolWeek? We are having a great time! Make sure you check out all the great posts from everyone down at the bottom of this post and enter the #BacktoSchoolWeek Giveaway happening right now!

This craft was inspired by my oldest son’s kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Malina. She was like have Mary Poppins for a kindergarten teacher. I really wish that I could find a way for her to win some kind of spectacular award for the way that she inspired my son in school and helped foster his love of learning. He’ll be starting 3rd grade soon and still talks about how much he loved her! My youngest won’t start kindergarten here in AZ. When he realized that he won’t have Mrs. Malina for kindergarten he was upset. That was the only thing that made him upset about the move.

Anyway…. Every Friday Mrs. Malina sends her students home with a little “treasure” that has something to do with their lessons throughout the week. They keep all of these in a little box, treasure box, then at the end of the year they bring them all back in and have fun remembering the school year and all they learned. Hayden still has all of his little treasures in the treasure box and had fun remembering them as we pack for our move. I thought it would be fun to make a treasure box for his 3rd grade year. If you have kids in school you know they are always coming home with some little token or reward and they just get lost in the shuffle. As an adult it may just seem like a little eraser shaped like a smiley face but to him he remembers the time we was caught being good and got to pick a special prize. Why not make a little treasure box to store it all so that he can go back and remember the year and as he’s older have fun looking through what was important to him in 3rd grade.

We’re moving so simple was the theme to this project but that also made it easy for him to help design and create this box. We used a plain, unpainted wooden box that we found at the craft store, scrapbooking “stickers,” acrylic paint and mod podge. Hayden first wanted a school but when we found the bus instead he was sold. He wanted to surround it with trees because of all the trees that we’re so excited for in Oregon. We started by painting the box his favorite color blue and loved that it looked like the sky! He also wanted to have the bus on a road but was very clear to me that he wanted perspective. What a funny, smart kid!

To draw the road we used a ruler to find the center of the top section of the box and basically drew a triangle with a pencil. Then we erased the top of the triangle and painted what was left. If that doesn’t make sense look at the picture right up there. 🙂  Then we painted the yellow lines down the center. We used Mod Podge to make the tree cutouts and bus stick, as well the letters we used for his name. We planned where everything would be placed before hand though and spread the small trees at the top and the big at the bottom to give it more perspective. 😉

Once the cutouts were on there he decided that he wanted to add clouds to make the sky look more like the Portland sky. I love that kid! As soon as the paint was dry we painted on a coat of Mod Podge over the entire box, including the cutouts. This gave it a bit of a shine and made the stickers feel more sturdy.

We’re so happy with the end result and can’t wait for school to start to make new friends, memories and capture them in this treasure box.

Don’t forget that there is a PinChat for #BacktoSchoolWeek this weekend with some pretty fantastic prizes. Not sure what a PinChat is? Well……

1. Go to the #BacktoSchoolWeek pin board on Pinterest here. It will be full of fun Pin graphics with questions about back to school. You can re-pin the questions, answer questions in the comment section of the pins and pin crafts/recipes to the board as answers to questions {only the comments on the question pins count as entries to the PinChatLive giveaway} How fun is that?!? {**Only ONE comment per question pin per person, please. Pinterest views multiple comments from the same person on the same pin to be spam}
2. Go to the YouTube video that will be happening during the PinChatLive from 6-7 pm EST Sunday Aug 25th. We’ll be chatting about back to school and doing a play-by-play of the pinning.You’ll be able to see and hear the hosts of #BacktoSchoolWeek and some of the participating bloggers! Comments on the video count as PinChatLive giveaway entries!
3. You’ll be able to watch/listen to the YouTube video while you see the PinChat unfold on Pinterest. Cool, right?