the “whiteboard” experiment

I tried to be economical and savvy and inventive…but I’m pretty sure it backfired. I had this brainwave that having individual whiteboards for my music classes (grades 4-6, mostly) would be an awesome way to help to rhythm drills and theory lessons, etc – and it would! It would be fantastic! But the thing is, those individual whiteboards cost a lot of money. So I thought I would make my own.

I laminated sheets of cardstock with 2 lage music staves printed on them. They were flimsy, but the whiteboard markers I had worked with them, and they erased rather well. I was excited.

I took them out in one of my grade 6 classes yesterday morning. The kids were really excited because it was new. We did some rhythm dictation and some note-reading exercises and all was great in the first class. But then, as I was working with one student individually, the kids started to play with their new “whiteboards” – they were writing notes to each other, they were seeing if they could colour the whole thing in with their marker, they broke markers and made the ink leak everywhere…Yeah. It was awful.

But I tried again with the next class. The erasers that came with the markers started to get really full of dry-erase marker dust, and wouldn’t erase very well at all. Now the desks were full of colour and so were the kids hands.

The sheets do clean up nicely with a little bit of that expo dry-erase spray – they were good as new again. I’d love to have the real thing, but I know that won’t happen this year.

So. I tried it. It didn’t work as well as I thought. The end.