A special ed teacher shows how to make reusable classroom materials without Velcro or color printing. Laminate pages and use a glue stick to attach paper pieces that peel off cleanly for corrections and reuse. The method works for anchor charts, vocabulary units, and center activities on any budget.
If your school was like my school when I was teaching, color copies were scarce. We had a credit or a certain amount that we could make, and when you use the color printer often, well, people kind of side-eyed you. I have heard from hundreds of teachers to where they're like, we only get this many, or we don't have a lot of access to it, or maybe you're just printing at home for color copies. We know that colored copies can be really important for students being able to match or identify items. And so I want to show you one of my tricks that I use, and I'm going to show you with this winter vocabulary unit. We just revamped this unit. It is one of my favorite things. I just did a video on how I used it in the classroom, but it comes with this really cool anchor chart. I would print this in color, and then I would also print the spell words in color, and I would laminate these pages. Now here's the trick. This one says that I'm supposed to cut and paste, but let me show you. I am going to laminate this and I will be right back and I will show you what it looks like. That is running through the laminator. I am going to tell you a little bit about this activity. So our goal here is that students will cut out these boxes and then glue them in the right section. Now I could laminate this and I could put Velcro on everything. Velcro is also expensive. So if you are on a tight budget, I've got your back. Don't you worry. And so you're gonna print these things. If you print them in color, that's great. If you can't print them in color, it's gonna be okay, I promise. So you're gonna also have choices. So the first one that I did, ooh, it just came off the laminator, looks like this. And so students cut and paste in this box. The other thing is that they could put, they could trace right here. So I would also laminate this. So you can use an Expo marker and use this again and again. If you just print this in black and white and have students do it individually, you can totally do that for all of these options, including this one. But if you print in color and you wanna keep these, laminate it, use an Expo marker. Same for these spelling. So students are using that anchor chart and then spelling the words with the boxes as prompt. So this is also a choice. But what really gets us is this one. If I don't want to buy Velcro, what do I do? So let me show you. All right, so here we go. I've got a laminated page and I have all my pieces. All I'm going to do is use a glue stick and then I can reuse these. Now, lamination glue to lamination, it works but not great. Um, so if you are working on gluing things, I suggest you you use a glue stick and regular paper and then laminated paper. So here, this one says scarf. I'm gonna have the student glue here and then this sticks right down and you can see it doesn't fall off. It stays put. When you're ready to take these off, you can, you can just peel this right off. It comes off. It takes this a hot minute to dry. So these are really become like movable. So if you were doing these in centers, you could have another student be cutting while you were working with students and having them glue these on. Um, and it just becomes a great way too, to where like if a student makes a mistake frequently, you can peel this up and you don't ruin the page, you know. So if you need to move things, you could easily do that. Um, this is just one of those hacks that I used to use in the classroom that I thought I would share If you are short on Velcro, you don't want to buy Velcro, you hate Velcro, you hate the scissors, you hate the feel, you hate all of it, this is a really great option for you.
