Back to School Counter Downer

I think my child is probably one of the few children on the planet that loves school so much that he is upset when it becomes time for summer break. Sometimes I'm not so sure if it is school that he loves so much or the routine of school. Either way, he has been asking pretty much since the last day of school how many more days until summer break is over and it's time to go back to school.

Now that we are in the home stretch of the first day of school (just three weeks left here) I decided to make him a Back to School Counter Downer. (In one of Noah's videos, Elmo has something that counts down the number of days till Christmas and refers to it as a "Counterdowner" which is why we call it that. Gotta love Elmo.)

So, I was in the Dollar Tree the other day and I saw this yellow felt school bus....

I knew it would be perfect for Noah's back to school counter downer. (Noah adores the school bus almost as much as he adores school!) So I walked around for a few minutes with the bus in my hands wondering exactly what I'd do with it when my friend, Monika, suggested putting poster board behind it. That gave me an idea so I grabbed a piece of black poster board.

When I got home, I used a pencil to trace the school bus onto the black poster board and cut it out. I then traced where the windows would go, grabbed my chalkboard paint, and a foam brush and painted the first window with the chalkboard paint so that we could use chalk to count down the days. When they were dry, I glued the school bus onto the poster board. I used my Silhouette machine to cut the words "days until school starts" out of a scrap of blue vinyl I had left over from another project and put those words in the second and third windows. I tied a piece of ribbon around a piece of chalk and glued that to the back of the bus then I glued some ribbon to make a hanger to the back of the bus as well.

And this is the end result..................

And here is my cutie with his back to school counterdowner!

 Yep, he totally LOVED it! 

And now it hangs on his door!

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