Classroom Gender Reveal

Before we announced we were having a boy, people would ask if I planned on doing a gender reveal. My answer was no, because Brett and I decided we didn’t want to make a big deal of it in front of people and we wanted the news of the gender to be something to share between the two of us for a little while.

Technically, I did have a gender reveal, though! My students actually knew the gender before we put it out there for the world to know. I had a fun afternoon planned for the announcement/reveal (my students didn’t even know yet that I was pregnant, let alone the gender of the baby) so I didn’t want to post about the gender and risk my students finding out.

I was SO excited to tell them!

I had found a few resources on Teachers Pay Teachers with activities made exactly for a teacher baby’s gender reveal, and I am so glad I did because it made life much easier for me that day (so did my mom’s help)!

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tell my students I was pregnant, so I used one of the resources that had the kids “crack a code” that eventually read “Your teacher is having a baby!” I thought it would be a fun way to tell them my secret! The boy who cracked the code first got wide-eyed and smiley when he read the sentence and it made my day.

Once we discussed what it said, I didn’t quite get the reaction I had anticipated from them! I thought they would be super excited (and maybe they were and didn’t know how to express it) but many of them looked really confused. I think it was because I didn’t have a big belly yet! So I explained how my belly will get bigger and bigger as the baby grows, and the baby is just really tiny right now.

Then they voted on whether they thought it was a boy or girl. Most voted boy! A couple even voted for both a boy and a girl, and I didn’t feel like ruining their fun by saying I was NOT having twins. 😉 As they colored their little footprint to pin on our class graph, they snacked on pink or blue cookies and cotton candy and sipped on punch.

Then came the really fun part! THE REVEAL! I had blown up 14 balloons – one for each student I would have in class that day – and inside three balloons, I put confetti. Two balloons had white confetti and the reveal balloon had blue confetti. The white confetti was to try to confuse them because they were able to see the confetti through the balloon and I didn’t want the reveal balloon to be the first that popped! I let each student pop a balloon and about three balloons in, they found “the one.”

The boy who popped that balloon threw his hands in the air and yelled “IT’S A BOY!”

They had a blast.

The last activity I had for them was to write down a name suggestion for their teacher’s baby boy. I had high hopes for this task but unfortunately the best names they came up with were Jack Jack and Bab.

I don’t think Brett and I will be taking their suggestions into consideration!

Paige