Painted Rock Memory Holders

     I am on vacation at my family's lake house.  One of the kids' favorite activities each year is to paint rocks.  The beach is covered with nice flat rocks and the kids love collecting rocks and then sitting on the dock painting them (I like doing it too:).
      Last year the kids painted the entire alphabet for me (read about it here). They were played with all year long in my classroom.
        This year we decided to use the painted rocks as the base for photo holders.  We held a beautiful memorial service for my parents at the tiny chapel on the bluff and then family and friends came back to the cottage for lunch.  The day before the memorial service we were looking at pictures of my parents and decided that we wanted to put photos on the tables rather than create a poster.  We found large colorful plastic clips at the tiny stationary store in town and then hot glued them to the beautiful rocks that the kids painted.

Materials are simply rocks, paint, big clips and hot glue.

       Voila... perfect 2-sided picture holders for the tables.  We put 5 or 6 on each table around the flowers.  It was wonderful because the guests loved looking at the fun candid shots. It would also be a great decoration for a Thanksgiving table (maybe with fall colors and big gold paper clips). I like that the kids painted things my parents liked such as flowers, dogs and Cornell:).

      At our house, painting rocks almost always ends up involving some body painting.  This is my Mom with grandson Brandon (who is now 15 years old). It was one of her favorite pictures.

      Lots of guests asked if I make these photo holders in my classroom.  The answer was "not yet."  I am having my nieces and nephews collect rocks for me to bring home so we can do something similar in school  this year.