Dr. Seuss & Headshot Tutorial!

We had the best Read Across America celebration on Tuesday! (we opted for Tuesday for a variety of weather and time related reasons). We did a balloon release:

Each class released 3 balloons, each with this note attached. I wonder how far our balloons will travel?!

Our principal read "Oh The Places You'll Go!" to the whole school!

Our school had a  bulletin board contest and we won! Each student colored a "Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!" sheet and then to give it a personal touch, I used the kids' pictures to create our bulletin board.

I created the pictures by printing out various black outlines of Dr. Seuss characters on card stock. I just did a Google search for them and then copied and pasted them into a Power Point document so I could enlarge them. Then I cut them out and used them as templates to trace the characters onto plain construction paper. My wonderful assistant then lent her artistic talent to the endeavor by adding all of the detail lines!

Note, I pixellated the faces for student privacy, but I think you still get the effect :)

With the Lorax and the Things, I used the kids' hand prints to make the mustache/hair just to add a fun touch! I had multiple kids as each character, since I only went with 9 different characters.

Using student faces in crafts or art projects immediately gives the project a personal spin. Students faces on popsicle sticks can be a great way to separate students into groups, randomly call on a student or assign group roles.Parents LOVE to see their students' faces on anything and everything! Want to use your students' faces in a project but aren't sure how to get a picture of just their face? Here ya go!

First you have to take a picture of each child in front of a plain background:

I'm using a picture of my son as the example. This is easiest if the background is a single color. Try to get the student's face to take up as much of the photo as possible so that you can use the picture as large or as small as you need to for your projects.

Upload the photo to your computer and open up a Power Point file. Insert the photo onto the page:

Left click on the photo, and then left click "Format". Under the "Format" menu, click on "Remove Background".

Expand the selection box so that the entire face is inside the box, with as much of the background excluded as possible. Use the "Mark Areas To Remove" tool to click on each area you do not want in your final picture. For some areas you might need to click multiple times.

If the eyes, hair or ears are pink, they will be cut out of the picture, so make sure to select "Mark Areas To Keep" and click to remove the pink from those locations.

I always try to keep any unique hairdos, like Tommy's little cowlick on the left side. Once the entire background is pink, click "Keep Changes". If you notice you missed an area or need to adjust something,  just click the back arrow to go back to right before you clicked "Keep Changes".

Voila! A clean headshot that you can use in multiple projects! Shrink it down or enlarge it depending on your needs!