Question, Wreath and Freebie!

First up, a quick question. As you probably remember, I teach in a Title I school where the majority of my kiddos live in poverty. I hear stories about water or electricity being turned off, items getting hocked, children not having heat/food/clothes at home. Of course the school helps out where it can, but money is still tight for the majority of these families. That being said, on Friday I looked in my box and found a stack of flyers for a "Breakfast with Santa" that was being put on by our local pizza/video games place. For $15 per person you got some breakfast pizza, cinnamon rolls and drinks. If you brought in a canned food item for the food bank, you got a free picture with Santa. I was absolutely floored. First, aside from the Food Bank item, this was not a charity event, but a for-profit event for the pizza place - why were we providing them with a free advertising audience?! Secondly - at $15 a person (even kids!) maybe about 5% of our school population would be able to go. I thought of my firsties taking this paper home and asking mom and dad if they could please go eat breakfast with Santa, and then I thought about those moms and dads having to say no because they didn't have the $ to go. I ended up throwing out  the whole stack of papers rather than handing them out. Some of the other teachers said that I didn't have the right to decide that my students' families couldn't afford to go, and that I should send out the flyers so that those who could afford it had the opportunity. So, my question is - what would you have done? Do you think I was out of line throwing the papers away?


Next up - a quick tutorial on my first burlap wreath! I made it for my Secret Santa at school - she's not a computer person, so I think I'm safe posting this :) Our big gift exchange isn't until Friday, so I'm actually ahead of schedule for once! I was inspired by this wreath by Just Sew Sassy, but I put a little bit of my own spin on it.This was really easy and quick - no sewing involved, which is the only reason I even attempted this, and it turned out so well that I am going to be making another one for my own front door this week. My only warning is that it is a bit messy, well, actually, it's a lot messy, but as long as you don't mind having to thoroughly vacuum whatever room you make this in, you'll be fine. As soon as I pulled out the burlap my husband advised me to make the wreath in the garage, but as it's unheated and the temperature is only 30 degrees today, I vetoed that suggestion!
Here is my finished wreath:

 I started with a 10inch straw wreath and about 1/2 yard of burlap in green, red and white. You'll also need large headed straight pins. Cut your burlap into 4x4 inch squares - since I'm so impatient, I stopped measuring about halfway through and just started guesstimating - as long as it's in the vicinity of 4x4 it works fine :)

Next you're going to take a square of burlap and fold it in half so it forms a triangle.

Then, tuck the remaining outer corners in between the middle point, so it forms a sort of pocket or square bubble.

Use your straight pins to pin each bubble to the straw wreath. I started pinning on the inside of the wreath and wrapped around towards the back of it. I chose to do an ABC pattern, but you could do blocks of each color or just do a scattered look as well.

Don't worry too much about loose threads or such, it's pretty easy to trim it up at the very end. Once you have a full wreath, you can go back and pin down any loose corners I hung mine up to see if there were any areas I wanted to repin or add in another square.

And finally - the aftermath:

But, I really think that the wreath was worth the time and effort to make it, and clean up afterwards!

Finally, a quick freebie for those of you who like to graph with food! I love using cereal/candy/marshamllows etc to graph with, so when I saw this box of Cap'n Crunch Holiday Edition cereal I had to throw together a graph for it! I do advise you to sort the cereal into baggies beforehand so you can sort out any broken pieces and make sure you get enough of the "special" pieces for each child!

Crunch Graph