New Solutions Using Page Protectors
With limited budgets and supplies of our own, teachers have to be incredibly resourceful.
Garage sales, Dollar Stores and the dollar bins at Target have some of THE best finds!
If you’re like me, you’ll buy something with no intended use in mind but you just know you WILL do something with it eventually.

And the best items are those that can be used for many different purposes.
The other day I was in a colleague’s classroom, admiring her clear plastic nametag holders from Really Good Stuff….the ones that you can insert and take out nametags.
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I don’t like to adhere nametags to my desks because I change students’ seats every month or so. We switch spots in class, so they just take their stuff with them and ‘move into their new home’. So I knew I had to have them!
But…
#1) Shipping to Alaska is OuTrAgEoUs and
#2) I knew I could figure out a way to make them.
This idea bugged me for a few hours and then I cam up with a solution: plastic page protectors!

But the nametags I make for my students are longer than the 8.5″ x 11″ page protectors I keep on hand.
So I went to Office Max and found legal size page protectors!
You can watch the video to see how I made them.
But I couldn’t get page protectors out of my mind and started brainstorming other uses for these wonderful things, sometimes with the aid of EXPO markers:

re-useable worksheets for small math or reading groups

Store gameboards in them and keep the pieces in separate containers.

Keep track of team points everyday.

Students can participate in the Calendar routine everyday (we do ours with the SmartBoard).

Daily, re-usable fluency practice for partners or small groups. The passage pictured is from a Fluency kit from Lakeshore Learning. Reading A-Z has good printable passages too!
