My Lollipot

As a teacher, you need incentives.  Treats.  In a special needs room, there are lots of dietary things to consider-gluten free, non-chewy, chewy, salty, etc.  One thing my class loves are dum-dums.  I hand them out as we check behavior charts, or when there is extra amazing work going on.  The Kindergarten teacher had a lollipop tree, and my friend and I loved it.  So we made one for ourselves! Here is how mine turned out:

I think it is precious! I can't wait for my class to see it.  They will love it.  I will have to teach them not to help themselves either.  The first thing we did was paint our pots.  We used acrylic paint and then mod podge to seal it after we decorated them.

I painted mine basic black, and I cut out some flowers and dots that match my curtains and such in my classroom.  I used the mod podge to adhere them to it.  (Mod Podge is the best stuff ever.  Just Sayin'.)

We then added some of those floral rocks that you can get at the dollar store to the inside to give it some weight at the bottom.  Then it was time for the ball.  That was a dilemma.  How do we attach it?  We decided to just use good ol' hot glue.  We set the ball in the pot and made a continuous stream of glue all the way around.  Worked well!

At last, it was time to add the lollipops.  My friend bought two huge bags of them (one for each of us), and we began to put them in.  We thought we'd start at the bottom since it was a straight line to follow.  We put them right next to each other as close as we could.

Man, it took a lot of dum-dums to get that thing filled!  It took almost the entire bag to fill one-over 300 lollipops!  There were less than twenty left.  It was crazy.  Crazy cool!  They turned out even better than we thought they would.  I love the lollipot.  I can't wait to use it.