This year my schedule is crazy (as I have talked about before.) I really love doing math centers, and at the end of the year last year I had a set of centers and a rotation down that was working perfectly. Unfortunately the minutes are just not in my schedule this year. I may be able to squeeze them in my morning block of time soon, but in the afternoon I have 120 minutes to teach 55 minutes of reading and 90 minutes of math. Obviously that does not happen. The first thing to go was center time, and everything else just gets squeezed in. I may panic every time I look at the clock from 1:00 to 3:00, but my students and I make it work. Even with the time crunch I still have those early finishers. I was at a loss of how to handle it. Should I do some modified centers? Should I just have some early finisher activities? I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Then my principal gave every teach $100 to spend. I scoured every approved catalog trying to decide the best way to spend my money. I came across Hot Dot Pens and thought that is something that the early finishers could do with no prep work from me. (We have brand new math frameworks for our math lesson this year and that is taking all my prep time and then some!) For $100 I got a set of six pens and a couple of boxes of flashcards. Being the ever greedy teacher, I wanted one for each one of my students. I went to Donor's Choose website. It was perfect timing because Kia was doing a matching promotion. I asked for 20 Hot Dot Pens and a whole bunch of flashcards and in a stroke of genius I asked for enough AA batteries for all the pens. The total including shipping and the donation to Donor's Choose was $666. By far the biggest project I have ever done on Donor's Chose. My wonderful parents donated some money and it was matched by a different organization. I donated some, and it was also matched. An anonymous person donated some and it was matched by a promotion at a local mall. Within 3 weeks 1/2 my project was funded and 1/2 was matched. What an incredible website with incredibly caring people who donate to it to help students they know very little about. A few weeks later I got this in the mail. Awesome!
It's like Christmas for a teacher! :)
I had to figure out how I was going to keep 21 pens safe. I was afraid of pens being thrown into baskets. The teacher who was in my room before had left these stands that she had never used. I put them together, bought some freezer bags, and stuck on some sticky hooks that came with my easel that I had never used. Then to add some extra education punch I put odd numbers on one stand and even numbers on the other stand. Its hard to see in the picture but on the blue strip above the hooks I wrote the number of the bag that hangs there.
Here they are being used. We have had them for a couple of weeks now and the kids absolutely love them.
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