✍️ Cheap dry erase board options + activities

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💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🙋‍♀️ Best dry erase board ideas from readers like you

My lap dry erase boards are my favorite teaching tool. I love tech, but there’s something about these boards. They’re tactile and impermanent.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my favorite ways to use dry erase boards in the classroom.

I also asked you for your best ideas.

Wow, did you come through!

Here are some of the best responses …

How to get dry erase boards for CHEAP

You told me that dry erase board materials can be found cheaply — if you know where to look.

Several of you wrote to me about shower boards — the kind that you use as a surround in a shower …

For dry erase boards I bought shower boards, like you would use in your bathroom around the tub, and had my husband cut them in lap size boards. I would then run electrical tape around the edges so no sharp edges. Lowes or Home Depot has the boards and are not very expensive. — Julie Stephens

I had the store cut it into 6 sections. I ended up with poster size white boards. I added colored duct tape around the edges so a "class" could claim a color as theirs for a certain project (like a science lab) that took multiple days. — Beth Heller

Other dry erase board alternatives

I buy plastic "picnic plates" from Dollar General (usually they sell a four pack for like $1 during the summer, so it's super cheap!) and I have a set of yellow plates we use. I store them in a mesh "laundry" bag thing along with markers (in a ziploc) though many of my students have their own. Works beautifully! — Tonya Skinner

Instead of whiteboards, I have SmartPals (dry erase sheet protector sleeves). (We just call them our "plastics".) I teach 2nd grade, and I have two pieces of paper inside. One side is primary journal lined paper that we use to practice our spelling. The other side is a handwriting page where the kids trace the alphabet and practice their printing. — Marla Aehlert

Cheap white board eraser alternatives

I also used socks or cheap dish towels from the dollar store as erasers. — Pat Hooker

How to use dry erase boards to teach

In my dry erase boards post, I wrote about the (still existing!) research that shows how the brain lights up with handwriting.

I also shared my favorite dry erase activities — student quick practice, teacher illustration for direct instruction, and rotating stories.

But some of you wrote about other activities you love …

I'm a Middle School French teacher and I use dry erase boards pretty regularly. We use them as writing surfaces for Gallery Walks and Talk and Turn activities. Honestly, whenever I can grab a whiteboard instead of a piece of paper, I do! — Jennifer Trott-Zisserson

We have whiteboard quizzes. I ask different types of questions and they respond on the whiteboard. Sometimes I have them draw pictures or jigsaw questions. It just provides a different way to review that's more hands on and collaborative. Something about putting a dry erase marker in a kid's hand levels up their excitement immediately. — Bettina Melton

My favorite activity I did with a dry erase board was the "golden line." We read the poem "Tell Them" by Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijner, and students highlighted the "golden line" they felt was most important. Then my students wrote their "golden lines" on the white board in orange and blue (the colors or the Marshallese flag). It helped us see where students' ideas converged and diverged, and the repetition of some lines that students chose over and over again revealed the most salient ideas of the poem and what it meant to the students. Some also added pictures. By the end of the day, with five classes' of golden lines, it was a work of art. — Molly Sroges

🗄 TEMPLATE 🗄

🖼 MORE activities that feel like Instagram

About a week ago, I shared this new Google Slides template — the Instagram profile template.

It was a hit! This TikTok video I shared about it got more than 18,000 views in the last four days. (That’s pretty good for me!)

If you enjoyed it, here are some more things you can do with it…

• You can change the “background text.” (A world languages teacher wanted to change the language.) In the menu, just go to View > Theme Builder to change any of it.

• You (or your students) could even use an AI image generator to make images for it. Here’s my post on AI image generators.

• Nine images might be too much. No harm if you remove the bottom three to make it six (or even remove six and stick to three!).

Oh, and there’s another template! The Instagram Stories template lets you use images and video to tell a story (or show a process) step by step.

Here’s the template … and here’s a post with ideas for using it.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!