A Different Kind of Bouquet

Teacher’s Appreciation Week is coming up so my kids and I wanted to honor their teachers with something homemade. Each year we do this. (Okay, so it hasn’t been many years since my kids are young, but we have included daycare staff in this as well.) We were thinking about making posters again this year but wanted to do something a little different. Something that they wouldn’t get 15 of.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading my daughter a book, Fancy Nancy’s Tea Parties by Jane O’Connor. If you have not read this series to your daughter you are missing out. These books are fantastic! And the illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser are amazing. My daughter loves them! But in this particular book there are recipes and ideas for having the ultimate tea party. That’s where we came across the Lollipop Bouquet.

We went to the store and bought all of our ingredients (different kinds of suckers, jelly beans and a flower pot.) The flower pots we purchased were simple ones but nice. In hindsight we should have just purchased simple terra cotta ones so my kids could paint them. That would have saved us a little bit of money.

I crumpled up a sheet of tissue paper to put in the bottom of the pots. You surely don’t have to do this step but without the tissue paper it would have taken 2 packages of jelly beans per pot (and I didn’t buy that many).

Then we filled them up with jelly beans.

The sticks on the lollipops were too short so we had to improvise. I used sticks that I had purchased previously at the Decorette Shop in Tigard. Another side note… if you have not been there you MUST! I could shop there for hours, looking for unique cookie cutters, candy molds and cake pans.

I taped on “extensions” to make the sticks longer – voila!

Out of simple green construction paper we cut out leaves and glued them onto the sticks.

Then we arranged them in the pots and put a few more jelly beans on top.

We took them to school this morning and the teachers loved them. Both of my kids had the biggest smiles on their faces when they walked into the building. How great is that! I love that they love giving to others. If I can teach them that, then the mess, the glue on the counter, the countless lollipops eaten when I wasn’t looking, was all worth it!