July 30, 2012

Shopping Trip 1

As I was traveling for the entire past month (33 days away from my bed!) I had to watch from the sidelines as everyone nabbed deals left and right.  But now I'm home and I get to seek out the deals that everyone has been boasting about finding!  Today I browsed the dollar bins of Target and found a few worthy buys.



Top Left: Scissor Bin.  Teaching geometry results in a good amount of cutting out shapes.  Last year I got a couple diner style baskets for scissors and protractors but the scissors would be easier to grab standing up.  Now there's a free basket for something else, like the markers.

Top Right: Dry erase markers and pom poms.  In a few #made4math posts (starting here) people attached pom-poms to dry erase markers so kids would have built in erasers.  I'm planning to give everyone a page protector with a piece of graph paper inside.  Hopefully we'll use them throughout the year to do a variety of things and I'll get to try some of the white boarding activities I hear so much about.

Bottom Right: Since many of my students forget pencils, I supply golf pencils.  The kids hate that they are short; I love that they come pre-sharpened, are way cheap and that the kids dislike them so much that they leave them behind.  However, there's the drawback of no erasers.  16 erasers for $.99 is a great deal, I may even leave a few out rather than hiding them away in my drawer for only the most desperate of erasing situations.

Bottom Center: Silly erasers.  They are hamburgers and hot dogs.  I have a basket of random little prizes that I give out when we play review games.

Bottom Left: Sticky graph paper! Not sure exactly what I'll use it for, but it was too cool to pass up.

Center: Self inking "Great Work" stamp.  I have a gold star stamp for A's on the first attempt, and a funny little clock guy that says "take you time" for kids who need to resubmit.  This one can be for improvements.  Love that it's self inking.

Less than $20 for the haul, which is impressive since there are 10 dry erase markers in that pack.  Too bad I don't trust kids enough to give them refillable markers (love love love my AusPen markers).

6 comments:

  1. Yay for good finds! I love the idea of cool gifts in the prize basket! Dammit, now I have to go back to Target! *grin* :)

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    1. The most popular prize is a glow stick bracelet (a tube filled with them is cheap!). I also have pads of paper, random games in the goody basket section of the dollar store and mini frisbees. I'll be interested to see if the Honors PreCalc kids have different preferences to my Geometry students.

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  2. Wow...I asked associates at Target MONTHS AGO about the golf pencils and they acted like they didn't know what I was talking about. Lol...you've convinced me to try again

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    1. I've only found golf pencils at Staples. And I didn't even find them there my last visit. Asking for them sounds like a good idea though.

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  3. I LOVE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    It's always amazing to me how many things we find to do with scissors and tape.

    - Elizabeth (aka @cheesemonkeysf on Twitter)

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    1. I love your enthusiasm!!! And yes, cutting things up, interacting with them and then organizing them is a great learning method.

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