DIY Dry Erase Boards/ Notebooks

I love dry erase boards (like many of you, I am sure)! The kids love using them and it is such a quick way of getting a good feel for how much of my class understands my lessons.

On my second year of teaching, I got free dry erase boards from a veteran teacher and I fell in love! She told me she got them from Home Depot and they cut it for her. The edges weren't pretty and there were smudges and stains everywhere, but for a poor second year teacher like me, they were a dream come true! My students could take those everywhere and write what they were thinking and respond to my lessons. It was all fun and games except for when in the middle of a carefully crafted and planned phonics lesson , a student (let's call him Jimmy) Jimmy sneaks to the back of the room and squirts some hand sanitizer onto his board and smears it around with his bare hands. Very surprised and proud, he makes his way back to the rug and nudges the kid next him. Jimmy, with a smile from ear to ear, shows off his smudge free white board. At the end of the lesson, I routinely ask my class to erase their boards. Jimmy quickly runs to the back of the room and squirts another blob of hand sanitizer on his board. Soon enough, he had a few followers, who were happy to see their white boards smudge free. The news spread fast and soon enough the whole class had spread some hand sanitizer on their boards. As I prepared for my next lesson, I was proud to see that my students were taking steps to clean their boards and make our classroom a better place (and I didn't even have to say anything)! Needless to say, our transition into our Writing lesson took a little longer that day as students showed off their "brand new" boards to one another.
The next day, my class was extra excited for our phonics lesson. They quickly grabbed their boards, markers and erasers. I was glad to start the lesson on time and students were happy to start practicing our spelling patterns. Then suddenly, I lost the attention of all my 24 little second graders (we have all been there, when for some reason, there isn't a single student engaged in you lesson). The hand sanitizer they smeared all over their boards the day before had now dried, but the markers didn't seem to like the effects of it. As students tried to erase their boards, they were getting big black smudges that made it impossible (in their minds at least), to use the boards. I gave up on the boards for that lesson and had them do something else instead. After school, I tried to clean those white boards and they seemed to work better, but somehow during every lesson after that, there were at least 4-5 kids saying they couldn't erase their boards.
I gave up on those boards entirely and tried many DIY versions of white boards. I started my third year with laminated card stock, but they are so flexible and don't erase well either, so I decided to do something about it. I looked into buying a class set of brand new white boards, but it was way out of my budget.

I wanted something that would look nice and would erase easily. I searched through Amazon and came across Krylon's Dry Erase White Paint. I thought about buying some wood boards and painting them, but that would be just as expensive as buying brand new white boards. So I thought that maybe I could use something I already have at school and just spray paint over it. I then came up with the idea of spray painting Composition Books and they worked! The Dry Erase Paint was just $11.99 and I made 27 Composition Dry Erase Boards.

I wrapped the edges of my students composition books with tape and put some construction paper inside of each so that the paint wouldn't drip inside their notebooks.

I spread them over some plastic bags I had in my garage and sprayed away!

You can still see through after the first coat.

And the second coat too. (I waited 30 minutes in between each coat)

After the third coat, some of the composition books are almost completely white.

After the fourth coat, all composition books are white. Now they just need to dry! I got too excited and used one of the boards after the first night I let them to dry. Big mistake, it did not erase well. I then waited (very impatiently) for 4 days like the manufacturer suggests and then they erased perfectly! And as a plus, they look super cute!

ClassDojo! Classroom Management Made Easy!

ClassDojo has changed the way I look at positive reinforcement! During my first year of teaching, I learned pretty fast that praising the behaviors you want will make them happen more often. I love the power of praising all students that are doing something right so that all others will want to be doing the same. Last year, I would go around the classroom multiple times a day giving out tickets. Every time a student got 10 tickets, they could trade it for a prize, or save it for bigger prizes. 

For my second year, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a bunch of red tickets to give out. However, my students this year were not getting any motivation from those tickets! I noticed that most of the time I would pull tickets out and try to go around the room silently praising students, most students would be oblivious to the cue.

As I thought about the different learners I have this year, I realized that what worked from my group of students last year would not work for my students this year. I then started looking for other classroom management ideas. I found many good ideas, but I was having a hard time finding something that would be visual enough for my students to notice when I was praising someone. I then came across this awesome video by Joshua Dumas, which showed how ClassDojo can be hooked up to the projector, giving a huge display of students' points for my visual leaners. As I started looking into it, I found more and more good things about ClassDojo. I loved the idea that you can be very specific with your positive praises as mentioned by Flapjack Education Resources on "Fifteen Ways to Give Positive ClassDojo".

I also wanted my students to be setting behavior goals and achieving them. I decided that each day that my students got 10 or more points, they would get a check on their tracker (you can get a Dojo Points Tracker here).

Get your free Belts Posters!

Once they had a few checks, they would earn a karate belt to put on their ClassDojo monsters.

We have had a lot of fun with these and my students have been working really hard to become Dojo ninjas! 

More next time!

Amanda Maliwauki

Addition Facts Practice! Freebie

Math Facts, gotta love them, right? They are not the most fun thing to teach, and they take a long time to stick, but once students can come up with answers without having to use their fingers, it makes a HUGE difference.

My students last year were a lot faster with their math facts, which made me so comfortable that I never even thought about the fact that I should be teaching and working on it with them all the time. However, during my first Math lesson this year, as I tried to start our Math program, I noticed that my students weren't remembering their facts. That's when I decided that we would take about half an hour a day to practice our addition facts.

During Math, I have 4 centers going around. One comes to me to go over the day's lesson. Another group goes with a Math Fluency parents, who times them and helps them with writing their math facts. Then we have an independent work center and a game center. For now, we have an addition Bingo game and also some addition flash cards. You can get a copy of the flash cards HERE!

More next time! =D

Funny note from a student!

I love being back at school! I love being busy and getting to know my awesome students!!! But I think that what I love the most are the notes and pictures I get from my students. Here is one:

(Dear teacher, we are friends. Remember to wear pants.)

Thanks for the reminder kid! Haha :)