You and your students have done the work. How do you put your art fundraiser profits to the best use? Whether you want to emphasize the arts, the humanities, or the sciences in your classroom, we’ve come up with a few ideas for enhancing your classroom with fundraising profits.
The Arts
Get a record player and a box of vinyls at a garage sale or vintage store!
There’s something about vinyl that’s just captivating, especially in the digital age. Whether you’re playing Mozart or Frank Sinatra or Bruno Mars, putting a record on is a great treat for the kids and a wonderful opportunity for them to learn about different styles of music and different eras of technology. If you have any music-loving, audiophile parents, this is also a great way to get them involved in the classroom, curating your collection and teaching mini-lessons on bands and even different types of audio quality.
The Humanities
Start a costume box!
Reading aloud is an excellent way to engage students and improve verbal skills, but what if your students were able to become the characters in their stories and share them with the rest of the class, their parents, or even the school… just by adding a feather boa or a vest?
You can use your profits to start a costume box (Halloween sales are a great time to start) and ask parents to donate used costumes and articles of clothing throughout the year to grow your collection. There’s even an opportunity here for students to learn improv or perform original stories from their creative writing units. (Don’t forget to reserve a portion of your profits for cleaning at the end of the year, though!)
The Sciences
Invest in a class pet (or plant)!
Whether your students are watching tadpoles grow into frogs or experiencing the strange excitement of waiting for seeds to germinate, there’s something so special about a class pet/plant. Your students learn responsibility in caring for the pet/plant, patience in waiting for it to grow, and biology in real time, from real life – not just from textbooks.