DIY Back to School Photo Prop Board: How I Saved Money and Taught a Lesson in Imperfection
Last month, I was scrolling Instagram at 9:30 pm, half under a blanket, folding the last of the new socks for back to school, when my feed flooded with first day photo shoots. There were custom hand-painted name signs, ruffled balloon garlands, kids posed against linen backdrops in crisp new outfits that didn’t have any permanent juice stains. One local photographer was charging $175 for a 20-minute back to school mini-session, and that didn’t even include the digital files. That same week, we’d replaced our water heater and fixed a blown tire on the minivan, and our disposable income for the month was down to $32 for groceries and gas. A fancy photo shoot wasn’t just out of budget – it was laughably out of reach. I felt that familiar little twist in my chest, the one that says you’re not doing enough for your kids, before I closed the app and walked out to the garage.
I remembered we had a leftover 2×3 foot piece of plywood from building our backyard playset the summer before, just leaning against the old water heater waiting to be hauled to the dump. I had half a can of matte white acrylic paint left from painting the kids’ bookshelves, a tin of chalk paint the kids got for Christmas that had barely been touched, and a pack of glitter markers from last year’s school supply haul that were still half full. I dragged the plywood out onto the driveway, hosed off the spider webs, and left it to dry overnight.
Next morning, I called the kids out after breakfast before we had to pack lunches. My oldest, Lila, is starting second grade, and my youngest, Jake, is starting kindergarten. I expected them to think it was boring, but Lila immediately leaned in when I said we could decorate it ourselves instead of buying one pre-made. “Can I write my own name and grade?” she asked. “All the ones I see online are perfect, but I want mine to look how I write it.” Jake immediately demanded a dinosaur in the corner, and then demanded two more dinosaurs, because “kindergarten needs more dinosaurs.”
We spent 45 minutes painting. Jake got blue chalk paint on his socks and on the dog’s paw. Lila smudged the “d” in second grade when she leaned on it too early, and then drew a big sparkly heart right over the smudge, declaring it better that way. There’s a faint knot in the plywood on the left side that the paint didn’t quite cover, and a streak where the old paint was too thick in one corner. By the time we were done, our driveway had paint splotches, we were all a little messy, and I hadn’t spent a single dollar.
We took the photos on the front porch 10 minutes before we walked to the bus stop. Lila’s new jeans had a grass stain from playing the night before, Jake forgot to comb his hair, and the sun was in the wrong spot so half the board is a little overexposed. When I pulled the photos up on my phone later, I started thinking about something I’d read recently about how kids develop perfectionism as early as elementary school. Researchers have found that by age 7, most kids already believe that mistakes mean they’re not good enough, and they’ll avoid trying new things if they think their work won’t look “right” to other people.
I’d always thought perfectionism was a problem for older kids, for teens and adults, but this little project drove that point home for me. For months, I’d been trying to figure out how to talk to Lila about her tendency to erase her entire writing assignment if she misspells one word, to start over on a drawing if the line isn’t straight. I’d tried all the generic lines – “it’s okay to make mistakes” “I like your messy work” – but it never really landed. Doing this prop board with her made me realize that kids don’t learn that lesson from what we say. They learn it from what we do.
If I’d skipped the whole thing because I couldn’t afford a perfect shoot, or if I’d made the prop board myself behind the scenes and just made the kids pose in front of my perfect version, we would have missed the whole point. Instead, we got to do it together. I got to show them that I don’t need everything to be perfect to have fun with it, and they got to make choices that mattered. Lila told me later that she liked our sign better than the perfect ones because “it feels like me.” That’s the lesson I was trying to teach her all along, and it didn’t cost anything or take any fancy planning.
For any other parents who are looking at all the fancy back to school content this year and feeling like they’re coming up short, there are a few concrete things I took away from this that don’t require any extra budget or time. First, use what you already have. You don’t need plywood – a big piece of cardboard from a moving box or an old poster board works just as well. Scrounge up leftover paint, markers, even stickers from old party bags, and you’re done. Second, let the kids do most of the work. Don’t fix their wobbly writing or rearrange their drawings to look better for the camera. Leave the smudges, leave the off-center dinosaurs, leave the things that make it theirs. Third, do it at your own pace. You don’t need to do it before the bus comes if that adds stress – do it after school on the first day, when everyone’s tired and a little messy, and it’ll still be fine.
Our prop board is leaning against the wall in our mudroom right now. Next year, we’ll pull it out, and the kids can cross out the grades and write new ones, add more dinosaurs, draw new pictures. It’s not fancy, it’s not perfect, and it’ll never get featured in any curated back to school roundups. The kids don’t care about that. Last week, Lila brought her teacher over to see it after school, and told her all about how we made it together. That’s the part that matters, anyway. I don’t know if this tradition will stick for years, but for right now, it’s working for us.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » DIY Back to School Photo Prop Board: How I Saved Money and Taught a Lesson in Imperfection