Student Bobbleheads for Display: How-To

Hi Folks! Happy Monday! I'm here with a Monday Made It to share. I am particularly fond of these little bobble head displays. My students are cute anyway, and the bobblehead style shows them off even more. They were a BIG hit with all our hallway visitors!

I have a long strip of hallway in which to show off what we do in the classroom. I like to make a yearlong spot for each student so I can swap out student work, without having to create a whole new display each time.

I saw a Pin that showed little boy and girl bobble head clipart, and it got me thinking about how I could use real photos of my students in a similar fashion. Because I am a somewhat low tech kinda girl and I didn't want to have to crop and alter photos, I took the photos for this project with the end project in mind.

I took a snapshot of each student's head with their head pretty much filling the entire frame in my camera.

No, this is not one of my students. This is my long suffering husband demonstrating how the student's head should fill the photo frame. Yes, he's wearing his yellow lego head and standing against a yellow wall in our kitchen because I wanted it to be a plain wall... we have no plain walls in our house...

Then I took a photo with the student's entire body in the frame... well, actually, I didn't. This first year I took the photo half way through their head– it helps if you have their entire neck to attach the big heads to later– down to their knees. This coming year I am going to take photos of bodies all the way down to their feet. I think the bobblehead element will be more obvious if the body is a little bit smaller in proportion than it was this year.

Next time the body photo will go all the way down
to include their feet

I printed the head and body photos in the standard 4 x 6 size. Then I recruited anyone I could... again, ever patient Jonathan, and we sat and cut out the heads and the bodies. Be sure to cut these out right on the outer edge of the figures– you don't want any excess.

I glued the big heads to the little bodies and laminated the whole thing as one piece. Then there was more cutting– this time I cut around the laminated figures with a quarter inch border because I wanted those little guys to last. You can laminate at school, of course, but I used my home laminator to do this... I tell you those things are great. They laminate with a thicker, stiffer plastic which keeps them flat and sturdy.

The trickiest part of the cutting was cutting into the bodies and around the fingers. You need to do this so that the display sheet can slide up into their hands and look like the figure is holding it. I laminated black sheets of paper, slide them under hands, then taped them to the back of the figure with Scotch packing tape– you know that wide, crystal clear kind that this teacher can't live without.

The laminated display sheet is there so the student work can easily be taped onto the sheet. Otherwise the student work itself has to be removed from the hands each time it is switched out. The fingers on those little figures are very tiny so you don't want to have to mess with them too much.

I discovered a great new wall hanging system through this project, too. I don't know about your school, but at ours, stuff likes to leap off the walls. Some kinds of poster putty work, but it is expensive and students have been known to take it. And masking tape works sometimes, especially if you hit it with a rubber mallet... ah ha! I bet you didn't know about the old rubber mallet trick, did you? Yep, I keep a rubber mallet handy and give posters a little pound after I put them up with masking tape. You can find rubber mallets like this one at the dollar store.

The Old Rubber Mallet Trick

This time, though, I knew I was going to be touching those little figures each time I swapped out the artwork and I really wanted them to stay put even when monkeyed with. So after a little exploring online, I found these tack squares.

These little double sticky squares work wonderfully!! Just two or three of them held each little bobblehead figure to the wall all year!

And the best thing about them is that they are repositionable and reuseable. They came right off the wall with no problem when I took them down at the end of the year. None of them tore or clung, even though they were still very sticky... SO sticky in fact, I kept them! I put them on the back of one of the black display sheets– yep I kept those, too– and I'm going to see if I can reuse both of them next year. It can't hurt to try.

And let me tell you, my kiddos LOVED getting to take home their own bobbleheads at the end of the year, too. They were one of the most favorite end of school "gifts" that they got. I wouldn't be surprised if they are up in bedrooms right now holding treasured masterpieces.

So there you have it! A brand new display idea to start the year and use all school year long. I hope you like it! If you do, would you please Pin It!

For more classroom display and set up ideas, keep scooting by. I am doing a series this summer on classroom design. I put together a page with links to everything from standing movement centers to valances to a classroom tour video. Click on the button to see!

One more thing... there's going to be a GIVEAWAY here in a few weeks... three giveaways to be exact! It is part of Teacher Book Talk Tuesday. More details will be on tomorrow's post. And teacher bloggers, if you would like to be part of the giveaway, then link up tomorrow with a book review!

Now, it's time to head on back to the other Monday Made It posts to fine more inspiration. There is always great stuff to be found at one of my favorite linky parties. Thanks, Tara!!

Don't forget to PIN today... if you're like me, you'll get ready to make the Bobbles and think, now what did she do again... and then forget where the heck you saw the idea! So Pin, Pin, Pin! And do feel free to share any way you'd like.

Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!