Teachers Gone Wild: Dollar Store Style!

What teacher can pass up a good deal at a Dollar Store? So while I was working in Louisiana, these teachers wanted to take a field trip to the Dollar Tree. Look to see what we found!


So while I was  in Baton Rouge for Destination Common Core, some of the teachers invited me to tag along on their Dollar Store Trip! Oh my word!  Now if you know me, you know that I couldn’t have been happier! It is like my all time favorite place to shop! It was a wild and crazy time! I think we filled about 5 carts full of things. While shopping we ran into a veteran teacher who spotted us as teachers right away. The lovely lady in the lower right hand corner taught school for 45 years! Yep…you heard me…45 years! And she lived to tell about it…
Here are some of the things we bought….

Here’s how to play Easter Bowling. Fill an Easter Egg with sand and hot glue it closed. Then, invite the children to stand up the pins and roll the egg to see how many they can knock down. You can use this for number combinations or for subtraction.

Here are some more “math” finds! With the pill box, use a saw and remove the Friday and Saturday sections. Now remove the large blue letters with nail polish remover. Inside of each section add a two sided counter and seal closed. Invite the children to shake the “fives frame” and record the number combination.
The stickers are used to make addition sentences, story problems, or number combinations.

For language arts here are some of our finds:
The drink stirrers make great pointers.
Add magnetic letters inside of the magnetic cookie tin for making words.
The plastic party favors are great to use for word frames.

More reading ideas: Use an exacto-knife to cut a hole in the frog’s and cub’s mouth. Invite the children to feed them og or ub words.
Use the carrots to make cvc words. on the top of the carrot, around the edge, write various onset letters. Then, on the bottom half write the rime. Have children twist the egg to line up an onset with the rime. Now, write the word.
Use the cars to segment phonemes. Make a “3 space” parking lot. Have children park the cars in the spots as they segment the phonemes of a 3 phoneme word. This is like sound boxes.
Use the photo frames to stretch out words. Place a small toy or word card in the frame part. Now use the dry erase pen to write the word where the message goes.
So have you been doing any dollar store shopping lately? Leave a comment with your favorite purchase!