Draw, erase. Draw, erase.

When I teach a class, we can go through a huge stack of paper in about thirty seconds. Which is kind of okay, if it's recycled paper or we're drawing on the back of paper someone brought from the office (yes, we do sometimes get what look like legal docs and stuff... urp!)

Anyway, I've written elsewhere about the wonders of white boards as a way to do two things - one is use less paper, and the other is to get students to just have a process without worrying about the result so much.

I have big whiteboard I put in the middle of the table sometimes. This turns into an interesting exercise as the kids try to "divide up" the board so they each have somewhere to draw. But also, they get into a groove of just drawing something, erasing it and drawing something else. Somehow this is much harder with paper, where it seems like you are rejecting your drawing much more strongly than if you drew it on a temporary surface in the first place.

And, with a whiteboard, you can draw WITH your eraser - which gets you an entirely different effect. You can fill in an area with color and then use fingers, paper, whatever - as long as it doesn't mess up your board's surface too much. You can also kind of "stamp" with your hands to make fingerprints. Nose prints are probably not such a good idea.

Anyway, this site seems to have a nice selection of inexpensive boards - including individual-sized ones, which solves the whole "Hey, you're drawing in MY box!" problem. We're in the process of getting some as we speak.

In the future, I'm also hoping to do some whiteboard animations, where we draw something and then erase/redraw parts of it and photograph it to make it look like it's moving. I'll let you know how that works when we try it. But in the meantime, put some re-drawable surface around and let the kids have at it!