OurWanderingAdventures : thrift store

Showing posts with label thrift store. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Thrifty Thursday!

This weeks thrifty purchases were less than 7.00 and some were exactly what I had been looking for! I love going thrifting and finding great things! Each and every one of these items was purchased with a plan for something except for those adorable picket fence trays! They were too good a deal to pass up for 1.00 for all 4 of them!!!!

I will start at the birdhouse and work my way clockwise:

Bidhouse with 2 baskets, this is really too Country for the style we have working in our home, but it was PERFECT to hold little bits and baubles at our nature table! (.99 can you believe it???)

Measuring Cups are something that I love to find for the water table and the sandbox and the mad science lab, they are wonderful for kids to use anywhere, even in the bath!! (.10)

5 books all for upcoming lessons we have this Summer and going on right now, except for Travel Mates (Perfect for the upcoming trip to Northern Wisconsin this week and Minnesota next month) and Mommies are for counting stars, I just thought that was sweet! 2.45

Avery Labels will be great for the kids to make their own stickers for their Sprng Break Journals. (.49)

Little Dragonfly Wooden Basket, for holding their salt and pepper shakers in their pretend kitchen. (.49)

Plate Stands are something I use to display books. I find that when you pull out a book from the bookshelf, it becomes a fast favorite! (.49)

The plate holder becomes a book of the week holder, holding a rock collecting book purchased today too!!

I added the BIRDS book too, since we are still studying birds and going to be making another bird feeder very soon with different materials this time! What are your latest thrifty finds?

~Michelle!~

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Thrifty Teaching Aids!

We LOVE board games at my house, but if your kids are like mine, the small pieces tend to wander off and get lost in that big black hole of nowhere! I Love to swing by the Goodwill and pick up any games that have small pieces that we go through like crazy! It's a super inexpensive way to build up extra pieces! As far as the game boards and extra pieces, we use many in crafts and others we just recycle if the local daycare doesn't need them!

This post is about thrifty teaching aids though! My kids are all at different stages in learning, but I find that if I get creative, I can use 1 tool many different ways! This week I stopped at the Goodwill with a purpose! I needed some letter tiles and I couldn't use Scrabble ones, because I go though those like crazy in my shop! As I strolled the game aisle, I found exactly what I was looking for! I picked up 3 games for less than 5.00 total with tax and had exactly what I wanted! Boggle Junior, UpWords and Quip Qubes! These games are some of our favorites to play normally, so I was able to replenish the games we had and still have loads and loads leftover for

our learning games!

With the letter dice from the boggle game, I love to use these by tossing them in my purse with a notepad and pencil. They toss 1 of the die and then they figure out how many words they can come up with (My daughter writes them down and my son just says them). It's a fun game to play at a restaurant when meals get too long or when waiting in line for something etc. The UpWords we use to spell normal words and sentences and then try to change the words up just like the game goes, only using sentences! We use them all for other fun stuff too!!

I had purchased these yellow teaching tiles before (at the Goodwill of course!!) and even though I got them for only .99, they sell for so much more money than that, if i ever wanted to replenish them! I knew I had to get creative!

I found this freezer bin at the goodwill for .99 and it was perfect to hold all our letter tiles! It gives the kids easy access to them and allows me to keep an eye on them too! This is one of their favorite tools for spelling!

I used the cards from the Boggle Jr. Game and put them on a binder ring, so that my younger two can flip through and spell the words they see! Perfect way to get them spelling and playing with words!!

My favorite find was the Qube game! It had all these cubes in it and they all have words on each and every side!! These are AWESOME for sentence building and also just popping in between words we make with the tiles! I sometimes have my daughter grab 4 of them and toss them and see what kind of sentence she can come up with!