Purchases I Regret as a First-Year Teacher

really this is a total waste of money [Music] hey guys it's been on that welcome back to my channel so I just finished filling a target dollar spot haul if it's not up yet it will be the next video that it uploaded but in doing so it made me think about all the things that I purchased for my classroom within the last year most of the things that I bought for my classroom last year I think that I absolutely loved and I don't regret purchasing them but they were awesome purchase that I was like really this is a total waste of money so I compiled a list of my absolute classroom favorites must-haves and also a list of things that I bought for my classroom that I absolutely regret buying and hopefully this will help you so the first thing on my favorites list is books and not the Scholastic's website but the Scholastic's are reading club website or that you do have to have like a referral code from a teacher from a classroom teacher so the way that I would order things when I was not a teacher is I would either order from teachers that I knew or my mentor teacher from co-teaching I personally prefer buying books through scholastics because one they are new and two prices through this classic Reading Club are really really great and you can also go to a book fair especially the buy one get one free Book Fair that one is my favorite so a couple of years before I started actually teaching our place orders here and there and that's how it sort of building my classroom library I mostly bought picture books but every now and then I would buy chapter books just in case even though I know my heart is in the primary grades but if you don't want to but if you don't know a teacher that you can order from or it's a summer and you can't really order from scholastics during the summer there's also a great alternative for use books and that is the website address books comm is definitely so into this website when I first discovered a I would place orders very very often and like I said they are used books but most of the time there are a really really great condition and most of the time they are also hardcover book prices range depending on what kind of book and how much in demand that book is but for the most part I bought like three bucks each and what I liked about this website is and you can get free shipping after ten dollars so if you buy like three books are like a little bit over three dollars or if you buy four books you get free shipping and you can also become part of their like loyalty programs so for every $50 to spend you get five dollars back to spend on the store or whatever so have her for a link down below so you can get five dollars off your first purchase if I get peggle arsov minutes purchase if you want to use it if you don't want to use it you can just go to the website books that come all right so now let's move on to a regret purchase and this purchase was lap desks last summer I went to Michael's and I saw this huge display of lap desks and they were in all fun color and with flexible seating being so big I definitely got sucked in and I bought five of them I think I wanted to buy more but I'm so like I did not it has nothing to do with the quality but it's just my kids didn't really gravitate towards him at all I would have set them out every single day I modeled how to use them and they were just not interested in them so with that being said obviously it was more of a personal thing it doesn't mean that your kids wouldn't like lap desk but for me it was didn't work out I even tried giving them to another teacher and her kids didn't like him either still if she came back and I just I don't even know where they ended up at but I do regret spending that money on those lab tests I think I spent about 30 bucks on them where I could have just gone to the target dollar spot and bought more cute things [Music] now a favorite purchase with the IKEA Cube organizers so it's the one that only has one cube like one row does that make sense I'll put a picture right here I have seen it on Instagram I think I had initially seen it on teaching and so forth Instagram and I loved how she would send up on it and her kids would send up on it and it seemed just really sturdy this serves so many purposes in my classroom is served like this little stage for me or my students I'm a little step up for the smartboard storage because I had baskets underneath each cube unit also served as a flexible seating option kids would like and do their work on it I just love it so much I think it's definitely worth it it's about 40 or 50 bucks so regret is TPT purchases or more specifically impulse TPT purchases off summer as I was preparing for my first year of teaching I wasn't really sure what direction I wanted to take my classroom in as far as to court and TPT has great class room decor bundles I kept scrolling through a bunch of them and like put inside my cart taking some out of my taking someone on my card and I'm into buying lots of things that I never ended up using for my classroom so I'm not saying that these were bad products whatsoever but they were just things that I bought without actually having a plan for them so for example I think I bought like this like classroom rules thing that I think it's really really cool but I didn't have a space in my classroom to like set it up in so it didn't end up working out and that's something I didn't think through so this little purchase is like that that ended up adding up to a lot of money and I never ended up using them another one of my favorite classroom purchases is like that Michaels rainbow drawer cart I'm not talking about the heavy-duty one that one's really great too but that one's like more expensive I'm talking about the one that actually has a drawer so we can take him out and I don't know I think it's super cute I started off the year with one of them and that's where I would keep my copies for the week and they also had different things like for like waiting herbs and stuff like that and then I just slowly started buying more so like I said I bought mine initially for like copies of the week and that really helped me stay organized and then the other ones that I bought were used for center storage so and that just made center storage so so great I went through quite a trial and error kind of situation with center storage until I finally found that the rainbow card storage was the best for my classroom and me all right so now I'm moving on to a regret last summer if you've been watching my books for a while this is a very beginning then you know that I bought a ton of like magazine tubs like the ones from Lake Shore but not from Lake Shore I bought them at Walmart and they were primary colors and I am not really big into Murray colors I'm more like a neon color kind of person so I bought them because they were like setup sticks for like ten dollars which is really really affordable in comparison to the ones from Lake Shore or really good stuff and I had researched how to like spray-paint plastic and I thought I made the best choice for a spray paint and stuff like that and they spray painted them all and it didn't work out [Music] it was tipping really really bad Leila's bubbling up it was just a hot hot mess I think I purchased like seven sets of those bins and they were just ruined by the spray paint so that sucked I'm sure the bins themselves are great but I would not suggest spray-painting plastic because that will waste your money next I love that I bought my own am inator in my own paper cutters so I have two laminators I have one from Amazon it's like an Amazon brand and it's really really great and I also have a scotch brand laminator I love them both equally I think my Amazon one was a little bit cheaper it was about eighteen dollars as opposed to my Scotch one that was probably like third dollars or a little bit less than $30 and I loved having two of them because I would have one in my classroom and if the pair of volunteering came in and had nothing for them to do if they would lie many things for me and cut things for me and if I was at home I could also laminate things and I didn't have to like you know like bring things back in for it my school did have like one of those big laminators but they had restrictions on what you could use it for so for example if I wanted to send something home like flash cards like laminated flash cards I was not able to use the lamination for that lamination was only done Monday Wednesday and Friday so having a personal laminator was definitely a lifesaver and going along with that a paper cutter I don't have like a super heavy duty paper cutter I won't line but I don't have one I have like a very like almost flimsy but not flimsy labor cutter and I love it it saves so much time [Music] all right moving on to another regret is seller tree chair pockets every time I go to Dollar Tree I can't help but walk through like the teacher aisle and I love seeing what's new and stuff like that and I remember seeing these chair pockets and I put a pole on my Instagram asking me if I should get them or not it was more like 50/50 and I didn't get them right away eventually I ended up getting him with school money like we have its money dispensed I thought them went back there very very flimsy material so I did have to replace quite a few of them and I honestly I don't think they would last an entire school year they look bigger lasted a semesters so I'm not think if you're gonna spend your money on tear pockets I'd rather just save up my money and buy really really nice ones then go the cheaper route and have to replace some more often so I do not recommend find a large air pockets a less room literally and I'm gonna have anything in there alright so the next thing I absolutely love and they are dry erase leaves at first I had purchased some from Dollar Tree that are actually pretty good but it's more cost effective to get them through Amazon so the ones that I got our pack of 30 and they were 20 bucks and they liked that I have a little place to put a marker in I don't know it does I love it and I would use this all the time for like centers and stuff like that and that way I didn't have to make copy after copy they will just reuse that one take a picture for their portfolio and that was it [Music] my next regret is like target dollar spot flashcards I've seen them this time around too there are just like little puzzle cards that you match up to make a word or like beginning sounds I don't know I bought quite a few of them last summer so if you go see my call from last summer that you see that I bought like 10 of them and really sturdy then I bought a bunch of these puzzles so I bought two of each one of them is called the Alpha that connect then I have complete the word our account and matched and they're great but they are not very practical in the way that kids cannot really put them back in the box if it came with and since they are all the same like template they can match things up to incorrect answer so they are not self-correcting and they didn't like that so I would just rather make my own on PowerPoint laminate them and stuff like that then you use those again [Music] my next favorite is more like a generalized favorite and that is a target dollar spot more specifically for bins and decor basically all the bins that I have in my classroom are from Target and I love the bright colors that they have but the sucky thing about that is that you cannot order online you kind of have to go to tons of different targets to find the amount or the color that you want but I think it's totally worth it they're super sturdy and they don't break easily and I just love them and then I also love the target dollar spot for different purposes like I just bought this I don't know if they have the cutest thing like an eye thing that you can definitely find things that are both cute and functional Takuma bands I do have a pin regret and I bought a bunch of bins from Dollar Tree and they were kind of like more they were bigger and I had some of them on my IKEA like cube unit and I didn't enjoy them for that but I did buy a ton of them for like center storage and I thought they were gonna stack up like with each other nicely and they did not and I had already bought like 15 of them so that is ugly I regret and also I didn't really have a plan on how to use them so most of my regrets are because either they were like poor quality or I just didn't have a plan for them alright my batter is almost gonna die and I am almost dead so I'm gonna try to power through this my next favorite are scooper offer chairs the ones I bought are from Wayfarer and I love love love them I remember they were out of stock for a while but I did put my email so I could get notified when they're back in stock and as soon as they were back in stock I purchased them the only bad thing about this so you cannot pick the clear that you want to get they just come in a sort of color so you kind of get what you get they're pretty inexpensive as well it was a set of sticks for like 35 bucks or something like that [Music] my last regret is not really a purchase but I still want to include it so while I was in college to become a teacher anytime anyone would offer me free books I would take them even went to a retired teachers storage unit to like raid her storage unit for books and I just took them off I didn't even like like go through them I just took them if and if you're preparing to be a teacher you're probably thinking like what like that's awesome and it was at the moment until I realized that there were books that were one either not appealing not in the best shape well they were super super old and thus made I'm not appealing instead of being super helpful instead it created like this huge mess in the spare room and then going through them took a lot of time and then it just took a lot of space like it wasn't functional and I didn't even use most of them so I think so I wish I would've been more picky about the books that I accepted [Music] one of them is HP instant ink I rave about this all the time to like my teacher friends if you don't know HP instant ink is it's basically like us your print server is like for ink you have to buy an HP instant ink compatible printer to be would it be part of the program but you can definitely like but then after let you pick a plan so you can have 50 pages a month 100 beaters a month or 300 pages a month so just varies in price or through gonna pages is ten dollars a month and if you don't use those pages they just roll over to the next month and you can just print unlimited like not pages but a limited ink so like if I were to print 10 pages of just full-color and run through my entire ink cartridge in the first day that it they started they'll just send me new ink and they'll keep sending the new ink they don't charge you Frank they trade you for pages and then you run out of the pages in your plan you can always just keep printing and they'll just charge you a little bit extra so for example for me they charge me an extra dollar for every 25 pages that I print extra so and if you don't use them all they just roll over to the next month I love HP instant ink I'll have a link down below where you can sign up and have some free months alright guys that is it for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed it and found it helpful and if you did please give this video a thumbs up let me know in the comments below what is your favorite classroom purchase that you've made as well as release favorite classroom purchase of you may that you kind of regret because I feel like that would be helpful to everybody in the comments below alright so that is it I'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: That One Happy Classroom

Views: 64,021

Rating: 4.9073462 out of 5

Keywords: Teacher, Teacher Vlog, A Day in the Life of a Teacher

Id: 97g4AdJPlfQ

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018