So my confession for today is that I have never been great
at keeping up with classroom pencils. It seems that no matter what I do, I
always end up with zero pencils in my pencil cup by the end of the week and
there are none to be found. My children waste them and they just end up getting
swept away at the end of the day which really gets me fired up.
I end up starting a new strategy each year and it almost
seems like each month throughout the year I have to develop a new strategy to keep up with them. I
think my biggest problem is that pencils are the last thing on my mind. I’m so
much more concerned about the students learning that I forget about pencils.
Another problem I have is that all of my scissors have disappeared. My next
blog will be how to stop classroom supply borrowers from accidentally borrowing
them for good.
My strategy around November was this: The pencil cup stayed
behind my desk which meant my students weren't just free to grab a pencil at
any time they wanted. They also had to pay me a “needs improvement” negative on
ClassDojo as well as write their name on the board under “borrowed a pencil”.
If they didn't return it by the end of the day, they had to pay me a certain amount
of their recess time. I know this sounds drastic, but pencils go like hot cakes
in my classroom. This worked great, but I wasn't able to keep up with it for
long especially after all the snow days we had and getting out of the rhythm by
February.
Another strategy I'm thinking might work is rewarding students for keeping up with their pencil each day, all day. At the end of the day they could earn five minutes of extra recess or if they do that all week, they could earn lunch with the teacher on Friday. This would really be hard to keep track of, but if you use ClassDojo, it might be easier.
Does any one out there have any simple strategies for keeping up with pencils? Have a good one!
