Originally Posted by Abigail:
Great ideas! For the rulers, do you get the short ones that fit in the pencil boxes (I'm thinking they are the plastic, flip top ones for a buck at back 2 school time) or do you get a twelve-inch ruler that folds in half?
Do you use a permanent marker to write the children's name on the box or do they just know which color of box they have? Feel free to share a photo, lol, a picture says a thousands words.
I use short rulers. I've seen them from the dollar store sometimes but a couple years ago I got a bunch as a free giveaway at a kids' events in my community. The kids use them for making straight lines, they don't really measure with them. If I hadn't gotten them for free I'm not sure they'd have been included in their pencil boxes.
For the past two years we've been using containers from Ikea. There were two packs of three boxes with a total of six colours (I only have six kids registered for care so it worked out) and then I wrote each child's name on a piece of paper and taperd it to the box. I didn't want to do anything permanent because I reuse the boxes as children leave care and new children start. Here are the boxes I got from Ikea, I think they've gone up in price because I only paid $6 for all six.
http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/80098583
This year, because the kids have more in their boxes now, I bought larger pencil boxes for each of them. I was able to find six different colours/patterned boxes at Walmart for $1.25 each. I probably won't label these ones because the kids will be able to identify their own box.