Monday Made It...Projects for a Dollar

I am linking up with Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics for Monday Made It.  This week, all of my projects were made with items from Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and the Target Dollar Spot.  

I got the idea for using the foam cubes from Dollar Tree for word work activities from Amanda from One Extra Degree.  I decided to use the letters for a Boggle-type game since I do not have the wall space to put up one of the cute Boggle boards. The kids will roll the dice and try to make as many words as they can using the cubes. I think this will be easier than the Boggle board because the kids will be able to move the cubes around to form the words.

I used my leftover foam cubes to make dice.  I love foam dice because the sound of regular dice rolling on a table drives me crazy.  I just used a Sharpie to draw dots on the cubes.  Then I found these great plastic containers (6 for $1 at Family Dollar) to keep the dice in (like I saw on Pinterest from Sunny Days in Second Grade).  The best part is that the kids can roll the dice while they are in the container, the dice will not become projectiles!

I wanted my kids to be able to easily grab the materials they needed for math games, so I used these black buckets from the Target Dollar Spot.  Each bucket has a deck of cards and a set of dice.  I made 12 buckets, so each pair of students will have their own to use. 

Dismissal at my school is a 30 minute process as kids are called for various buses, day care vans, and car rider groups.  Last year, I felt like this was a chaotic and wasteful time.  This year I’m going to try using this beach ball as a closing activity.  The kids will pack up and come to the whole group meeting area where we will pass around the beach ball.  Each color of the beach ball has a sentence frame that will help the students sum up what we learned during the day.