Bench Crates

My first classroom D.I.Y.:

Bench Crates

This, by no means, is my original idea. It is so all over classroom blogs that I don't even know who to give credit. I saw this and loved it as an idea for the carpet area. The students can have all carpet materials ready in their bin, so the students don't have to move around the classroom. Also, these are easy to tote, so the students can go anywhere in the room and read. For now, I just made three, but the plan is to make a class set.

For this, I bought the crates at Target for 3.99. I later saw slightly wider crates at Walmart for 3.49, but I had already gotten these three. Then I took the crate with me to Home Depot and asked the guy to cut some boards the size of the opening. All I had to pay for was the wood (which was 4 dollars for these 3 squares, but if I wanted to buy more, I can get 12 squares that will fit for 7 bucks. I purchased a pack of fabric swatches, because they fit perfectly over the wood and allowed me to have some variety. I also purchased some padding and green ribbon.

So, I cut out strips from the padding that were the width of the board, and then folded the strip to cover my wood. I put in a staple on each side just to keep the padding in place. I then covered the wood and padding with the fabric and stapled it down on the backside. The last step is to add a ribbon under the wood so the wood is easy to pull out.

We are going to experiment further with these three boxes. We have talked about getting whiteboard paper and making the back side a white board. We even though of adding the hardware of a clip board.