

Another great BTSA find, was the handled file box. This was later replaced by the padfolio, but luckily I held on to mine. I used some "S" hooks from IKEA and hung it by the handles from my desk. I put a red cross on it with electrical tape and I call it the "First Aid Kit". It holds files for each day of the week and when papers are handed out in class, the extras go in the folder for that day. When a student is absent or loses their paper, they can go to the file box and find it.

Our school ordered several sets of headphones for the computers and the boxes were the perfect size for the novels that we were reading. Handing out books every period was taking more time than I liked. The books were numbered, so I covered the cardboard in different colors of duct tape and assigned ten books to a box and a student helper to be in charge of the collection and distribution of those ten books. On the front of the box I stuck a clear plastic sleeve with the book numbers for the books in that box and wrote the students names next to the numbers. This made it easy to figure out who had a missing book.

I'm not really sure what this thing is. It is some sort of a clicking counter that I occasionally use when I have a student that is having some major issues with blurting out. I use this counter to measure actual data to see if behavior modifications are successful. It is also much better to cite actual data rather than to say a student is constantly interrupting when discussing behavior with parents or administrators. I added a sticker to it and dubbed it the "Yacker Tracker".

I bought my kids a Melissa & Doug Band in a Box and it came in this handy wooden crate that I now use to hold the daily warm ups. When the students enter the room, they take a warm-up (short text or notebook entry) and go to their seats. Text warm ups have a prompt that involves "Turn and Talk" or "Quick Write" and "Notebook Entry" is a teacher input that needs to be added to their interactive student notebooks. I made labels on card stock, hole punched them, and attached them to the wooden crate with metal rings. I can easily flip the label to let the students know what type of warm-up activity they need to start when they come in.

This is a low tech, quick way to assign students to groups using gum containers and centimeter cubes. Since I no longer teach elementary math I didn't really have any use for these centimeter cubes, but again, I hate to throw things away. I put two colors of cubes in one cups to make groups of two, three colors for groups of three, four colors for groups of four. When I need to get students into groups quickly, I walk around the room and shake a cube out into each child's hand. In about thirty seconds I have random groupings. I also use these cubes to assign work when doing a jigsaw type of activity. The assignment is divided up into colors and I assign the work (vocab definitions, pieces of text, questions from the text, etc.) based on what color of cube falls into the student's hand.