Let’s face it, when the coronavirus hit and every mom in America was promoted to homeschool teacher for two weeks, no one could have imagined it would be the rest of the school year. So many things changed so quickly.
As the mom of a kindergarten student, it meant the tradiational kindergarten graudation I had been looking forward to since the day my little one was born wasn’t going to happen. In the end, she did get to have a truly unique graduation ceremony (more on that later).
Graduating kindergarten is a big deal. Graduating after your mom has attempted to teach you while working full-time, is an even bigger deal for mom. But how would we pull off kindergarten graduation photos?
Photos that would have usually set me back at minimum $15-$50 for one pose from the professional company the school uses were no longer an option. So I turned to Amazon to see if I could find our own Kindergarten Graduation Cap and Gown. And like always, they didn’t fail in providing results. There were so many options in fact, that I wasn’t sure which one to go with. I was surprised at how affordable they were. I paid a little more than $20 for an entire set, and that provided me the freedom to take unique kindergarten photos without copyrights attached to them from a professional photographer.
In the end, I picked the cap and gown option that came with a sash and a graduation ring. I knew the graduation ring would be something she would enjoy playing with, and the price for the full package wasn’t a whole lot more than just a kindergarten cap and gown. Note: The ring is cheaply made (similar to what you find a cheap-o quarter machine), but she loved it nonetheless.
Next up we had to come up with kindergarten graduation photo ideas. While I scoured Pinterest for ideas, in the end, we just really “winged it”. She wasn’t overly excited about the idea of having to stop playing to go take photos for kindergarten graduation, but once she got going taking them, we had a lot of fun.
We took over 1000 photos, and I narrowed them down to about 40 that I loved. I put four of my favorites in this blog as ideas for you.
I think the best advice I can have for others looking for kindergarten graduation photo ideas is this:
- Buy the Kindergarten Graduation Cap & Gown (not only can you take as many photos as you want, but for $20, it makes a great addition to your child’s dress-up clothes box after the photos are done)
- Grab several of your child’s favorite books and take photos with them. They make great props.
- Go to the school and take photos in multiple locations (playground, school signs, gym, classroom if available, etc…)
- Think of unique places to your family (for example, my husband is a pilot, so we borrowed some planes at the airport)
- Have fun doing it.
- Photos look most natural when they’re not staged. One way to help with that is tell jokes to get your child to laugh, and snap…snap…snap away! Again, we took 1000 photos to get 40 really good shots.
Kingergarten COVID-19 Graduation Parade
The other thing I loved about buying our Cap and Gown was that we had it when the school decided to hold a Kindergarten Graduation Parade so the students could drive-thru and pickup their diplomas from their teacher. Of course that meant we also had to decorate our car.
Our car decorations were super simple. We printed off 8.5×11 photos we had taken of her throughout the year, along with a few cap and gown photos, and placed them all over the car. We used painter’s tape to put them on the car, and it worked perfectly. We also used chalk pens to decorate the windows.
Unfortunately for us, 10 minutes before the parade started a 30 minute thunderstorm poured on the car as we waited in line. So by the time we drove through the parade, all of the decorations were destroyed. But we still had a lot of fun decorating the car for the kindergarten graduation parade.