So far this year, I’ve gotten the most bang for my buck from school supplies by adding individual whiteboards to my classes.
Target currently is selling (in the dollar area) individual whiteboards made to look like sheets of paper. They also have whiteboard markers at two for a dollar. At the start of the school year, they had miniature whiteboard erasers at two for a dollar, but I haven’t seen them recently. It would be easy to erase the boards with scraps of fleece, tissues, or, as we did with the slates we used for this kind of activity back when I was in school, orphan socks. In the past, I’ve seen people use cut up slices of shower board, but these are around the same price and my students really like the fake notebook paper design.
I bought large ziptop bags and made up a kit for each student, each of which has a board, marker, and eraser. They live in a copy paper box until they’re ready to be used, when each student in class gets a bag.
There are a variety of things we use the whiteboards for, but I usually ask a question and have students write the answers and hold the board up. Everyone participates this way and I go around “Yes…Yes…Check your answer…Yes.”
What I use the whiteboards for depends on the level. Recently I used them with my sixth grade class to review endings of the second declension: I called out a case and number and they wrote the ending. In my elementary Classics class, I used the boards to review locations of major Roman provinces (I numbered each one on a map on the board and had students write down the numbers).
The students enjoy using the whiteboards much more than other things that let them review or practice. It lets me see how everyone in the class is doing, not just one person I call on, followed by a bunch of nods.
