Cheap and Easy Alternative to Whiteboards

Greetings friends! I hope everyone is enjoying their summer!
 
I can't put into words how useful whiteboards are.  You can do SO much with them and you can use them with pretty much any unit to reinforce just about anything.  The awesome thing about whiteboards is you can give students immediate feedback and they can practice applying the things they have learned one question at a time.

I teach at two schools.  Thankfully at one school I have a full set of whiteboards.  However, at the other, I need to share with the other language teachers.  They also know how useful the boards are, so it can sometimes get difficult to coordinate with them. Especially if I want to use the boards last minute (if I have 10 minutes to kill at the end of a lesson or even realize in the middle of a lesson we need to stop and assess understanding).

One very cheap (and colorful!) alternative to white boards are those cheap plastic plates you can get in the summer at Target/Walmart/etc.  The only requirement is that they have a glossy finish and not a matte one.  I went to Walmart and got 8 packs of 4 plates for $8.  And they work just as well!  As you can see from my photos below, you can write on them just fine and they erase really well. (*TIP: if you don't want to pay for erasers, every time you get a hole in socks, don't throw them away... just wash them well and they work as great erasers!)

Just be sure to get them before summer is out.  They are at their cheapest now and they aren't always carried in the fall/winter.

CLICK HERE for my bundle of white board activities! $3 off for the summer.

Original plates in package

 

 

 

 

 

 

With writing

Easily erasable

All clean!

Do you have what I have?

I saw a post on another teacher blog about a game called "do you have what I have?" to help practice vocabulary.
Basically, you put all the kids in a circle and give them a whiteboard.  Each round, the students pick a random vocabulary word and write it on the board.  After everyone's done writing, they reveal what they had.  You get a point for every match you have.
I played it this way in my first French 1 class today and the kids loved it. But I noticed they were always choosing the easy ones like "une orange" or "une tomate" (the cognates).  Because of this, I decided to mix it up for the second French 1 class.  Instead of getting a point for a match, you get a point if NOBODY matches you.  It encouraged them to dig a little deeper into their vocabulary memory and use some of the oddball ones.
I liked it much better this second way and found that they got much more out of the activity.  They all seemed to love it! They asked if we could do it again sometime.
There are many different variations you can do depending on where they are in the chapter.  In the beginning, maybe they can be allowed to have their vocab sheets with them.  Next step would be no sheets, but maybe some pictures on the board and not so picky about spelling.  Next step would be no pictures, but also not so picky about spelling.  Last step (for the end of the chapter) would be no prompts of any kind and spelling needs to count.
I will definitely be playing this again!