Favorite Thing Friday - Bulletin Board Strips

I am in love with making things out of bulletin board strips. Here are some strips that I have waiting for further development. I love how colorful they are, how INEXPENSIVE (I paid a dollar per package), and how versatile these can be. I primarily use these for matching things, but I also use them to play games (the strips end up as the game board) and to make file folders for other things.

These particular bulletin board strips have colored fish and numbered frogs. I'm using them with my little kids who are working on color recognition and number recognition. All the Fish Are Swimming in the Water with a slight adaptation to include colors (all the red fish are swimming in the water, swimming in the water, swimming in the water) incorporates the colors into a song that encourages creative movement. The other strips pictured here have numbers and lily pads. I use these as is for Ten Green and Speckled Frogs. Having the strips assists the client in sequencing and being aware of the duration of the song. They can see that we aren't finished yet. so they know how many more verses we have. I also use these as number lines for kids with higher academic skills to complete simple arithmetic (often within the same song).

I have many other strips at home. I have planets, musical instruments, classical composers, stars, you name it. My creativity is limited only by my imagination.

Some tips that I've discovered about how I use these things...

• Each long strip project takes two strips - one for the background and one for the pieces. Double your purchase to get more strips for an entire large group set of strips
• Use some of the strips to make coordinated file folders. Anything you can do with the strip pieces can be done on a folder
• Each client needs their own strip. If you are pressed, maybe two folks could work with each other using on strip, but no more than two per strip. This allows for everyone to see what needs to be seen

There you go - an easy way to make attractive kid visual aids that can be used in many different ways.

One of my favorite things...