DIY Truffula Trees

Oh, how I love summer and the extra time I have to be crafty and create things for the school year. 

I've wanted to jazz up our library space for Dr. Seuss' birthday for the past couple of years, but it always sneaks up on me and I run out of time. Not this year, I'm planning ahead and creating my Truffula trees now so I'll be prepared. 

If you're interested, here's how I made mine.

To make the trunks...

Cut pieces of black Duck tape and wrap around the pool noodle. 
Tip: Don't add the last stripe of Duck tape until after you attach the pom pom

I left some of my trunks as a full-sized pool noodles and cut others in half to create different sizes.

 To make the pom poms...
The EZ PZ way~ purchase premade, 12" diameter tissue pompons from The Dollar Store. These are a bit smaller and look nice on a half-sized pool noodle. The purple and red trees in the picture below are made with the store bought pom poms.

To make your own~ purchase colored tissue paper and follow these directions from Martha Stewart.com

The large pink tree in the picture below is a DIY pom pom. I used the tissue paper sheets exactly as they come from the Dollar Store (20 x 20" sheets) and used 10 sheets to create each tree top.


How to attach your pom pom to your Truffula trunk

And here's the finished product~

I love how these turned out and they didn't take all that long to make. I personally like the way the DIY pom poms turned out as they are fuller looking and seem to lay and fluff nicer.

Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ End of the Year

As we send our students off, many parents ask for ideas on things that their child can do. With that in mind, this week's Tech Bytes offers something a little different.....
How about offering your students a variety of coding activities, sites, and resources that your students can access over the summer months? The link image below will take you to the normal Tech Bytes slidedeck where I've also included a pdf file of this page that you can download and then easily share with parents via Seesaw or email. All links are hyperlinked for parents and in PDF format they will still work. 

This is the last Tech Bytes of the 2018-19 school year.