Primary Christmas Presents

Since I'm in the primary presidency in our ward, I was a participant in coming up with and creating our gift to the primary kids and teachers.
A few months ago our ward ended up with several boxes of chair covers (the soft padded chair covers that everyone wants to sit on during stake conference if you miss your chance at a bench. . .) Anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about in the pictures. So the other counselor thought that she would take a box and hide it in our closet until we could figure out what to do with them, but she knew they could be used for the kids Christmas present. Well, after some thought and some internet searching we settled on making lap desks. Diana came up with our final design, and although it was ambitious, we decided to do it. And here's our final product after hours of building and help from lots of people, I think they turned out really cute. We had a little Christmas party for the kids on the 21st and gave the kids the gift.








































We used melamine for the white board part. You can buy huge sheets of it at a Home Depot type place and have them cut it for you. Then we had vinyl lettering made with the 2009 Primary theme "My Eternal Family" along with each child's name. We also gave the children a zipper pull with the theme on it, you can find it here, they are really small, but totally cute. Each year there are a new round of songs that the children learn from the annual Primary Program in Sacrament meeting, so we put those songs along with others, like the Article of Faith songs, on a CD so that they can learn them at home too.

Here's a picture of most of the primary kids with the primary president. It's not a little blurry, but still fun.













The teachers unfortunately didn't get as awesome a gift as the kids, but we still thought they deserved something good for all the work they do. When I was visiting Utah in November I saw that my father-in-law got a teacher appreciation gift (he's the music leader in their ward, awesome!), it was this cute bowl of Hugs and Kisses, with a little poem. I decided to steal the idea. I found these really cute ceramic baking pans at Michael's and Joe helped me put the gifts together. I think they turned out nice.