Calendar Placemats

Free food for all! No, I'm not kidding! In the county I work in, this is actually true. All of the students in our school are provided with free breakfast and free lunch (if they would like it), how about them apples? Since everyone gets free breakfast, a breakfast bag is delivered to each classroom with milk, juice, and breakfast of some kind. The students are offered a host of delicious items. They get cereal, an egg and sausage breakfast pizza, yogurt and granola, or even french toast for breakfast. So, you might be thinking, how does this work? Everyone comes to class in the morning, unpacks, and then is able to take one of each item back to their desk. As you can imagine, this tends to turn their desks into a big sticky mess! This year I tried to combat this by making calendar place mats. I hate throwing old calendars away because I love tropical calendars and the pictures are just too pretty to throw away. I have actually framed a bunch of these and hung them up in my classroom. However, this year I decided to turn them into place mats. The students just get their breakfast and a place mat in the morning. They throw everything away and shake their mat into the trash can. Their desks are SO much cleaner! You don't only have to use these for breakfast, you can use them to help students with personal space during group work, or even at home if you have a little one!

They were really easy to make. All I did was cut the pictures off of the calendar, laminate the pictures, and then cut them out. Poof! 12 brand new place mats. They look like this:

Now I have to say that if you are using an old calendar, make sure there isn't anything inappropriate written in the calendar anywhere. Not that there would be but you might want to white-out that OBGYN appointment! Just a thought (:

I only had one used calendar so I had to buy another one so that there were enough place mats for each of my students to have one. Any dollar store is GREAT for this! One dollar, 12 place mats. I think that's a good deal (:  I got a Sponge Bob calendar because I know how much my students love him.

Front:

Back:

Well, that's all for today. I hope this is something you can use too! If you have any other ideas of how to use these place mats, leave a comment below! Over and out.

-OneCrazyS