Mad Hatter's Tea Party on the 125 Day of School

    I was asked to substitute on the 125 day of school for a friend's first grade class.  I bought this Mad Hatter hat at Disney World two years ago and really wanted to wear it.  I also bought the crazy sneakers down there.  I added some capri black pants, a long white shirt, and my velvet coat to complete the ensemble. 
     The teachers and I set the rooms up so that we had 7 tables of four in each class.  We bought 7 different colors of plastic tableclothes to cover them.  You can see in the picture that we are packing everything up at the end of the day.    

I bought this cute apron on Etsy.com.  One of the teachers wore this.  I have ordered more for next year, since the day was such a success.

I made four big white rabbits--one for each classroom.  I also made 28 centerpieces--seven for each of the four classrooms.  I cut oasis styrofoam in half and made colorful cardstock boxes to fit around each one.  I bought 2 bags full of wooden dowels at Michael's.  I cut tissue paper stacks straight from the package into four sections.  I used these sections to make tissue paper flowers.  We hot glued those to the tops of the dowels.  I found a leaf pattern and put a box between two leaves.  See below.  We cut these out and folded two sets around the dowels for leaves.  Print these out 8.5 x 11.0."
                              
     I brought my silver tray in and two silver teapots.  We served apple juice from them.  I found disposable cups on Amazon.com.  I ordered enough for the entire first grade.  They loved pretending it was tea.  The parents sent in oreos, but that didn't seem festive enough for me.  So I made tiny pie shells in my mini muffin pans.  I used boxes of refrigerated dough and my scalloped cookie cutter.  I brought in four boxes of vanilla instant pudding, milk, and zip-lock bags.  You put the pudding and milk in one of the  bags and seal it.  Then you put that bag upside down in the other bag and seal the second one.  The kids can pass it around to shake it up.  It makes pudding.  We all did this in the four classrooms.  Then we snipped a tiny hole in the corner of the bag and piped the pudding into the shells.  We used Cool Whip (no dairy issues with it) in pastry bags with a star tip.  The kids loved watching us pipe the cream onto the pies.

 I made up the chart above.  I had an Alice in Wonderland clipart to go with each box.  We made posters for each classroom.  When the answers were all added up, they totaled 125.

Disney has a free clipart site to grab these characters.   We printed out these Mad Hatter hats on cardstock for the kids.  They colored them and glued them to sentence strips.

 

In the Alice box above, there was a house with the Alice parts enlarged and sticking out of it.  The questions in the box were "the number of windows and the number of smoke puffs coming out of the chimney."

 Finally, we printed off this coloring sheet for each child.  Some of the kids were happy to just color these characters, cut them out, and glue them to their sentence strip headbands.   The teachers and kids had such a great day.  Me...I was super hot in the hat and velvet coat.  The kids begged me to keep it on.  I ordered a rabbit hood for next year.  I can wear it with a LIGHT WEIGHT white sweatshirt.