My Nonprofit Reviews

I teach kindergarten in a big urban district that has many problems. One is lack of $$ for supplies. Kindergarten needs a lot of hands-on activities and we can go through materials quickly without wasting anything. For example, if each child paints one picture at the easel 5 times a week all year, that requires a waist high stack of 18 x 24" paper and gallons of tempera paint. I am using old packs of colored paper (not white) and paints I scrounged from the trash in schools that were closing. I buy a lot of supplies and 95% of the many necessary materials in my room (puzzles, books, displays, housekeeping center play food, dolls, math manipulatives, etc.) belong to me. I either bought them at garage sales or stores or for my own children when they were small. Pretty much only the furniture, basic textbooks/workbooks, math kits, and a couple boxes of copy paper are all we are provided. This year we are getting $100 to spend on supplies but we have to buy from expensive teacher or office supply catalogs so it doesn't go far. I spend hundreds of dollars of my own each year on things from places like Dollar Tree. These are things we use all the time for organizing materials, making crafts about the letters and numbers, holidays, and so on. These little kiddos just don't learn from doing worksheets.

Anyway, Crayons to Classrooms gives us all kinds of wonderful things that are very useful. Like glue and glue sticks, paper, boxes of lovely posterboard, scissors, reams of cardstock, incentives for the kids, markers, pens, paint, notebooks I use for reading logs, all kinds of amazing stuff. It is not all typical teacher store items - I have the kids make ABC scrapbooks and we glue all sorts of things in them - many things from Crayons to Classrooms. Here's another example - Out of date calendars with beautiful dog paintings allowed each child to adopt the dog of her dreams and write about it. They all used the stick -on numbers and letters to put things in order. We all made posters about how walking to school is healthy & cool. We use the same posterboard (and DC2C's glue) to stick on and count 100 items (Cheerios, paper clips, etc.) in sets of 10 a couple times a week.

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