Reading Pointers

My ultra-cheap whisper phones left me with enough money to make some cute "pointers" for reading the room/word wall work.

The painted wooden pieces were around $0.29 each at a craft store. While at the craft store, I picked up two 5 packs of wooden dowels for $1 a bag. So for $5 and in less than 20 minutes, I made all 10 of these fab pointers.

I struggled with how to cover the plain wooden dowels. Well, haha, "struggled", let's not be dramatic. But I did puzzle over it for a day or two. I was busy so I kept passing this little pile on the sewing table and wondering....do I modge-podge tissue paper onto the sticks? Cut and modge-podge scrap book paper (which is not a hobby of mine, and would require a second craft store run)? Eventually common sense (and an aversion to glue mess) prevailed and I wrapped each stick in colorful duct tape I already had on hand. Then I hot glued the pre-painted wooden shapes to the tips (I stopped the duct tape an inch or two from the top of each stick).

Boom! I also made three extra long ones in exactly the same way. The extra long dowels were $1 each, so for $4 I made three extra long reading pointers too. The extra long ones will work for pointing to the word wall (it's tall, baby) and the number line above the white board and the alphabet at the top of the back wall, too.

Go to town, kiddos!