Signs of the Times

Judging by the looks of my Facebook feed this past week, it would seem that Pinterest has now made cute chalkboard signs a requirement for all first day of school photos.  There were very few back to school photos I saw that didn’t have some type of chalkboard-inspired print or hand-lettered sign as a prop.

I loved seeing the many variations and was truly impressed by the planning and creativity  that went into everyone’s back to school photos.  Growing up, my mom simply snapped a quick first day picture of my siblings and I just before we were headed out the door to school.  Our props were nothing more then our overstuffed backpacks.

I do love a good chalkboard sign and I can see the appeal since school and chalkboards go hand in hand.  I used a chalkboard sign last year to mark my son’s first and last day of preschool and I decided to keep things consistent and re-create the same hand-lettered chalkboard sign for my daughter this year.

For my son, however, I wanted something a little bit different then what everyone else seems to be doing.  He is in Kindergarten this year so I wanted to come up with a design I could use and easily adapt for all the first day pictures to come.  He LOVES Lego and I don’t see that fading anytime soon so I decided to create something out of Lego to mark the all important first day.

I will admit that it would have been a heck of a lot easier to design something on the computer and print it off, but the finished product was worth the effort.  It was actually kind of relaxing to sit down and play with Lego, and my son was happy to try and help me work out a design.

And, now that I have a design set in place, it should be easy to re-build and modify for each school year.  My plan is to switch out the “K” in the school house with the new grade number each fall.

I am happy to report both kids had a smooth first day and I was even happier with how co-operative they were for pictures.  Having a prop that they were excited to hold definitely helped.

My son questioned why I needed to take pictures because it  “is just the first day of school and isn’t important”, but hopefully one day he’ll understand and appreciate my effort to capture these moments.