Colorful Goodies & Our Gallery Walk!

I stopped by Staples yesterday to look for some dot stickers and came home with a ton of fun stuff!!

I didn't know they had dollar bins, but they do and they are amazing!!

I love the fun polka dot folders and poly zip pouches... I'm thinking I can use the pouches to store task cards for some of my word work stations!

I am going to use the Microfiber cloths for the students to use as erasers for their white boards. Usually I just have students bring in a sock, but I like the idea of having these instead! They were just $1 each and I am going to cut them so I can get several "eraser" squares from each cloth!

The amazing colorful "mini" containers look like the exact ones that Denise from Sunny Days in Second Grade used to control dice for math games! You simple put two in each container and no more dice rolling all the way across the room! :)

source: Sunny Days in Second Grade

And of course, I got pink pens, a fun pink gem-stoned picture frame for behind my desk at school, and some fun, colorful erasers!

Also, I wanted to share some pictures from our gold rush gallery walk that we did this week! We have been reading lots of books, singing songs, and learning vocabulary all about the gold rush, however I wanted my students to see and reflect on some real pictures from that time!

I found a variety of pictures, glued them to pieces of construction paper, and hung them so they were spread out around the room.

Then we talked about who had visited an art gallery before, and what the environment is usually like there (quiet, people thinking about pictures, walking, etc.) I told my kiddos that I was going to give them time to walk around our gallery and do those things, however our gallery was special, because they would be able to carry around a pencil and write their thoughts and questions on the construction paper around the picture.

They were so excited!

For the next 15 minutes or so, they walked around and looked at the pictures and wrote down what they thought about each one...












After they were done, I paired them up and gave each couple the task of analyzing two pictures, reading their classmates' responses, and then presenting the pictures as well as the overall thoughts that the class had on each picture.

Ending remarks: "Can we do another gallery walk tomorrow?"

Gallery walks can be used for any subject! You could also have students do a gallery walk when they have completed a project, so that students can see each others' work! Instead of writing on the project, you could even have a blank sheet of paper next to the project for gallery walk comments!