Labor Day has come and gone, and with it, the beginning of the school year. For teachers, this is an exciting time – time to make lesson plans, organize their classrooms, and outfit themselves with school essentials. These can include everything from chalkboard erasers to food pellets for the class pet. How can you stretch your budget to make your classroom the best place to learn?
Here are a few ideas to get you started on building a budget-friendly classroom that will help your students do their best.
1. Classroom Decorations
One way to promote learning is to make your classroom a cheerful and interesting place to study by adding colorful decorations. Items like decorative borders can brighten your classroom with interesting designs or add to an overall theme. If you’re doing a unit on biology, for example, why not decorate your classroom with tropical fish?
2. Aids for Reading and Writing
Sentence strips are a great way for elementary students to learn to read and write. To best utilize them, write a sentence on your blackboard and ask them to copy it onto a sentence strip. The large guidelines are very useful for small hands learning to make letters, and the flexible surfaces let children choose inks, pencils, or crayons – whatever medium they prefer to use as they learn to read and write. Speaking of pencils and crayons…
3. Affordable Art Supplies
Nothing gets kids more excited than coloring and crafting. We could easily write an entire article on the best arts and crafts supplies available for kids, but here we’ll try to limit ourselves. Arts and crafts are important for kids of all ages, not just the little ones, so we’re offering a broad range of suggestions that will make kids across all grade levels happy.
- For painting, you’ll need palettes, paintbrushes, and paint.
- Want to organize a more mess-free artistic outlet? Shop our selection of crayons.
- Don’t forget paper. Whether you need construction paper for crafting, newsprint for writing practice, or even graph paper for your math students, we have it in stock.
- Kids love making more out-there projects. Put their creativity to the test by stocking up on yarn, paper mache, and googly eyes.
4. Get Ready for Math and Science
Your students may groan, but math is an important part of any education. Fortunately, you can make it fun! Math games like Fractions Bingo help hone arithmetic skills for students aged nine and up, while flash cards can help students practice all of the major math techniques – counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and more.
Experimenting in the classroom can be fun for kids of all ages, even the little ones. Start with this classroom measuring set that can help students discover the density of liquids as well as learn equivalencies between the metric and standard systems.
Teaching a student is never inexpensive. Children are expressively visual learners who require stimulation. Bright colors, messy projects, and non-reusable materials are all part of the process. However, even with a tight budget, it’s possible to start the school year in style.
