Mardi's Musketeers

This past school year brought a new theme along with it - "Wild About TAKS" and the old igloo no longer seemed to blend in with the new rainforest theme I now had going on.

Not wanting to get rid of this fun reading area so soon, and besides, it won't fit through the doorway, I decided to recycle the recycled. I found some brown spray paint that actually halfway sticks to plastic and spray painted the outside of the igloo. It then looked like a reading cave and I figured that would do nicely, since they have caves in rainforests. Right?

But shortly, I happened upon dollar tiki torches at one of elementary teachers' favorite stores, and that's when the rebirth of the igloo into a tiki hut began.

It wasn't until I was cleaning and boxing up my classroom at the end of the school year that I actually went in the tiki hut myself. I was removing the swinging monkeys and that's when I realized that it really was a cool place for first graders to practice reading.

In the fall, our theme is going to be "racing". I'm kind of dissapointed because I really wanted to try my hand at a milk jug castle this time. I don't see how it will mesh with racing, but where their's a will, their's a way!

I've already found a used Little Tikes red race car bed on ebay that I can fill with checkered flag print pillows. My daughter told me there's a haunted castle in the old video game Mario Kart. Hmmmmm.