Decorating Teacher Tom

A couple days ago I posted about a belated Thanksgiving Day craft involving feathers made from small clothes pins.

I'd made about 250 of the things with the idea that the kids would just take them home on their paper plate turkeys, mainly because they were cheap and I didn't want to store them. MaryLea from over at Pink and Green Mama, from whom I borrowed this idea, wrote in the comments"

. . .your turkey feather clothespins are great and I KNOW your kids are going to find a lot of other uses for them -- I can see it now, feather clothespins anchoring forts and clipped to the edge of tents, etc.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me that they would have a life beyond this project, but at MaryLea's prompting I left a small basket of the leftover feather clothespins in the classroom on Wednesday and forgot about them.

Preschool teachers get used to the feeling of little hands touching and tugging on them, but at some point I noticed a pull on my shirt tail that was stronger and more insistent than normal.

Well, MaryLea was right, except instead of forts and tents, a clutch of our 3-year-old girls had decided to turn me into a turkey.

Yesterday, the other kids discovered the feathers and the game they developed was to secretly clip them onto their friends and the other adults in the room. I'm sure several of us went about our evenings yesterday unaware that we'd been decorated. It wouldn't be the first time.