Birthdays!

Outside of school, I LOVE birthdays!  In my house growing up, you had a birthday month.  Birthdays were big.

In the classroom, they tend to stress me out.  I think it's because I want to do so many academic things each day with the kiddos that taking even a few minutes for birthdays stresses me.

But, because I love birthdays, we still do a bit.

First off, I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' for their Birthday Display Link Up.

Here is my display this year:

I love how all the different fonts look together.  I also adore the cupcake border that I inherited with my room.  I cut one strip up to go above each month.

I had originally planned to do the whole pictures of students holding up their birthdays for each month (I've seen it so many places, I don't know where to give credit!). But ... I didn't do it the first week because there were kiddos absent each day ...  the second week, I kept getting told I was getting new students in two or three days, so I waited ... and then it was Back to School Night, and I needed birthdays up, so I just wrote names and dates.  I'm sure some of you deal with that each year and still manage pictures, but it is very much not normal at my school!

 Each month's spot is big enough for a 4x6 picture, so I'm hoping to do that next year.

Our Little Tiny Celebrations:

• I write Happy Birthday, ________! on the board, and it stays up all day.
• They get a "birthday balloon pencil." My two kiddos who have had birthdays so far have been so excited with them!

I pick a pencil I think the kiddo will like from the literally hundreds of pencils in my prize box.

• We have a wellness policy that says no food for birthdays (yes, you read that correctly, not no unhealthy food for birthdays, NO food for birthdays).  If a kiddo wants to bring something, I have them pass it out as the bell rings at the end of the day.
• I usually have the class sing Happy Birthday, but I just realized we haven't for the two birthdays so far this year!  Opps!  One thing I learned from my wonderful cooperating teacher when I was student teaching was to ask the birthday kiddo if they wanted "cha-cha-chas" or not.  If they say no, no one is allowed to make those sounds at the pauses.  Most kiddos say yes, though, so the class goes crazy cha-cha-chaing at each pause!
• I also do "un-birthdays" for summer birthday kids on their half-birthday (or as close as we can get ... end of June's birthdays have their half birthdays during Holiday Break).  I will teach the kiddos part of the Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday song for us to sing (if I get on that singing thing again this year) and they will get an "unbirthday balloon pencil."

How do you celebrate birthdays?