Organizing for next year

Each year I notice a trend in my classroom. Students bring in supplies, I buy a ton of community supplies, and by winter break, our supplies are greatly diminished. We clean out desks only to find glue sticks missing tops or dried out, broken pencils with no erasers and chew marks. By spring break, we are using any writing device we can find and I am sharpening hundreds of pencils each weekend. This is of course in addition to finding all these things all over the ground. Needless to say, things need to change.

So, I had this brilliant idea to create pencil boxes with all the supplies students need, labeled with their number, that they will need to keep track of. If they lose them, dry them out or eat them, they will need to figure out how to get new supplies. Here was my process. 

First, I have been waiting all summer for some great deals on pencil boxes. Staples had them in sale for .50 each. I found a coupon for 20% off my entire purchase. They came out to .40 each!

I found 10 colored pencils for each box.

Wrote out their student numbers on labels and put them on the tops.

I know how hard my kids are on supplies, so I put packing tape over the top to protect them.

Then, I put three sharpened pencils in each box, each with their numbers on them. I figured I could give out three new pencils each term. If students need to sharpen them, they can put them in the sharpen basket and I can do that after school. (I would let them sharpen, however my sharpener cost $80.)

All these supplies will be in addition to the supplies they bring themselves to school.  I know students will be much more responsible with materials when they know there isn't an endless supply. We shall see!