We did stars in December to go along with the Christmas lessons and kept them up until after Epiphany. In the spring, we did butterflies and dragon flies and let the children color them. When we took them down, I sent the ones they had colored home with them.
If you have a suspended ceiling in your space, this is really easy to do. Just use a paperclip or binder clips to attach fish line to the metal grids between the ceiling tiles. It is a little tedious to punch holes in each item, cut the line, thread it through and knot it. I make little loops on the end that will go around the paper clip. If you use binder clips, you don't even need to make a loop at the one end of the fish line, just clip it to the grid. When using paper clips, I always used white ones so they blended in with the tiles.
Why decorate for the seasons? Kids notice it, and so do parents. It says to me that you care enough about the children coming that you want to make their space special. I didn't always do this, but whenever I did, the children loved it. You can watch the video below to see what we did.
If you are interested in learning how we decorated our walls in the J.A.M. Center, you can read about it in several posts. You can link to several sites that provide the materials to draw the designs in my post DIY Theming That Doesn't Look Like You Did it Yourself.
Snowflakes from Joan Eppehimer on Vimeo.
