This week while visiting my local Dollar Tree, I saw many, many items for Dios de Los Muertos, aka Day of the Dead. I have to admit I did not know much about that holiday until I saw the movie Coco (which was awesome), and when I was the temporary Spanish teacher at my school. I am a full time building sub at an intermediate school. When school started back last year the school found themselves without a Spanish teacher. Our school was in person four days a week with Covid protocol, and the past teacher who had health issues decided to retire right before school started. My principal asked me if I could fill in as the Spanish teacher until they could hire someone. I said yes, but there was one problem. I knew muy poca espanol. I had not taken Spanish since high school over 30 years ago, and remembered very little of it. I went through past worksheets, and started looking up ideas on Google. I taught some basic words, colors and numbers. Thankfully, they found the perfect person to be the full time Spanish teacher before the third week of school. She is from Mexico, speaks fluent Spanish and knows all about the culture. I assisted her for a few days when she first started, and also helped her with this altar at the end of October for Dios de los Muertos.
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Most of the supplies she bought were from the Dollar Tree. She covered boxes with black plastic tablecloths. The skulls and banners can be found in store and online on their Day of the Dead page. She also added colorful prayer candles that come both with skulls and without, and several votives. We had the kids color small skeleton printables there were used as the photographs of loved ones who had passed. We helped the kids make tissue paper marigolds from different shades of yellow and orange tissue paper, and green pipe cleaners. When everything was pulled together, there was definitely a WOW factor, and the kids learned a lot about the holiday.
There were so many items that I found during my recent visit to the Dollar Tree that there are just too many to post one photo at a time. Thank goodness for Canva!
Which item is your favorite?
There are even several more items at the store that are not pictured. Seriously, there are so many great items available you could definitely celebrate with on a teeny tiny budget!
Did you know that you that DollarTree.com has a many party, holiday, and craft ideas on their site? If you want to see in more Day of the Dead ideas you can see how to decorate your own sugar skulls using a basic $1 skull here.
If you would like to keep up with my Dollar Tree finds, crafts and reels, be sure to follow me on Instagram.
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