Skip to main content

Dry Erase Desks







I saw this in a teacher's room and thought it was an interesting idea. I am very curious to see how the desks will look in December, at Spring Break, and the end of the year.
She said she used them the year before and it worked out great for her for the whole year. She only teaches our gifted and talented population (fourth and fifth grade).
She bought the laminate roll from reallygoodstuff.com as well as the colorful tape that is holding it to the desk. I asked her about students picking at the tape and she said that she is really strict about that from the beginning of the year and didn't experience any problems.

She teaches math and science and uses it in both subjects. In science they can take lecture notes and then transfer them to their notebooks. When she has them watching a science video they also take notes or mark down questions they might have. On the desks are caddies with dry erase markers and socks for erasing.

On as side note (mostly for new teachers) when purchasing dry erase markers for the class always purchase them in one color (black works best). I made the mistake of purchasing a variety pack one year and the squabbling over color choice just about drove me insane.

Comments

Ginger Snaps said…
That is a FABULOUS idea!
Anonymous said…
I do this just on the desktops. (Light colored desk) It works fine. The first time I did it last year the principal happened to walk into the room and over to a boy who is ALWAYS in trouble.

The boy blurted out - she told us to. Principal burst out laughing and hugged the boy. He assured the kids he was ok with them using the dry erase on the desks. (Yes my male principal regularly hugs our kids. They often rush up to him and give him a hug during the mornings as they come into school)

I clean the desks by squirting hand sanitizer on the desks. It evaporates quickly

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock...

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more ...