My Wink Gave Me Away

I have an antique desk that I found this summer through a friend from college. I had been looking for an inexpensive one for a few months to pursue an idea that I saw back in April that another first grade teacher had in her classroom. 

She had an old desk that she allowed her "Student of the Day" to sit in, and it was covered with hand-painted Dr. Seuss characters. I fell in love with it and began to dream big, but all of the desks that I found were over $100. When I saw a $10 old desk at a friend's garage sale, I knew that this was the one.

In August, my husband and I worked on sanding it and repainted it with a white primer. The plan for the year was to paint on book characters each Friday, and allow the students to discover the new characters each week. I started two weeks ago.

I am including pictures of my first book character. 

We read a book called Al Pha's Bet by Amy Krouse Rosenthal during the second week of school as we were reviewing our letters and sounds. This is a made-up story about the man that put the alphabet letters in order, as we know it. His name was Al Pha, and he made a bet with himself that he could please the King with the sequence of the letters that, at that time, did not have any particular order. The king loved his sequence that he created, and therefore named it the Alphabet because Al Pha made a bet with himself. It was a cute story full of puns and wonderful illustrations. 

I decided to make Al Pha our first character. I started by roughly sketching him onto the front of the desk. 

And then I painted him. I chose an easy first character to make myself feel more confident. I am not an artist, by any means! But I was very pleased with how he turned out.

Here he is compared to the copy of himself that I pulled
from the book.

On Monday morning, I could hardly contain my excitement. I was hoping the students would notice him quickly, so that I wouldn't have to keep his existence a secret for very long. They did not let me down. It was less than a minute before they were proclaiming that Al Pha was on our "Student of the Day" desk. I feigned surprise, and proclaimed that Amy Krouse Rosenthal must have come in our classroom over the weekend and painted him onto the desk. They laughed and smiled with excitement. I did not trick them however, they knew that I must have painted him. I proclaimed that I wasn't an artist, so how could I have done that?! I proceeded to wink at a particular student as I said this fact. To which he replied, "Mrs. MacLeod, I know what this (he winked at me) means!" I smiled.

It's going to be a rather fun year, as the characters on this desk continue to appear.