Tattle Monsters

I saw this on Pinterest yesterday, and thought it was about the cutest idea I had seen in a long time: Tattle Monsters.  Since I have major, major tattling in my classroom this year, I thought it might be a fun way to give the kids an outlet for saying what they need to say and a means of solving it.

Here's what I used to make it:

Glue gun

scissors

sharpies

google eyes

furry material

table tennis balls (dollar store!)

a hinged box (I used two)

a sheet of white craft foam

Craft glue

Warning: furry material is horrible to work with. Our house now looks like the dog got ahold of Elmo and shook the daylights out of him. It was reminiscint of the shaving/wedding cake scene from American Pie. Except the groom was Ronald McDonald.

I decided to make 2 boxes: one to hold the tattles and one to hold the slips. I started in the traditional fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method by laying out the material and cutting it big enough to wrap each side of the box. Then I tried to hot glue the bottom on. Epic fail. Who knew that hot glue wouldn't stick to the shiny underside of the fur I picked out? The tacky glue worked wonders, though. I glued the top and bottom fur on, and then let it set a bit. 

This is the big box, and I highly recommend using a box with a hinged lid. Once I got the top, back and bottom glued on, I trimmed the side materials so that I could just pull it up and glue it on with no folding.

Here is the small box, with the sides glued up. After I took this photo I decided to trim the fur around the mouth so that the box could close easier.

I cut a strip of the white foam, and then trimmed the teeth. I laid a line of glue along the bottom of the teeth, and then pressed them into place. Then all that's left is to let the whole thing dry, glue a google eye onto the table tennis balls, and then glue them onto place on the head. 

To go with the Tattle Monsters, I created this poster (again, credit goes out to Mariah at Giggles Galore): The art is an original by me. 

The slips that the kids will fill out will be kept in the little box. There are 4 up to a page:

Lastly, I wrote down some very simple conflict resolution ideas on table tennis balls, such as "walk away", "count to 10", "take 3 deep breathes", "say I'm sorry", etc. My girls and I drew monster mouths around the words, and then colored in the rest of the ball to look like a monster. I forgot to grab a photo of them while I was at school today. I will try to post one tomorrow. I will keep the balls in a container next to the Tattle Monsters, so that the kids can take a ball and see if that solution will work for them.