Individual School Boxes!

I am on a bit of an organizational kick these days. Something about the end of the regular school year and the start of our summer school session that has me ready to get everything sorted out and changed over. One of the things that has driven me crazy recently is the constant losing of school supplies. Everything has a place and in a perfect world everything would be *IN* it's place. Ah...yes this isn't a perfect world I forgot for just a second. I am fully back to reality now, and missing about 100 pencils. 

We decided to get each of our older girls a "school box" for all their supplies. We ended up going to 4 different stores looking for just the right box to start with. I didn't want a traditional box where everything is in once compartment and lays vertically all mixed together. We have several of those and they were just not working for us. I wanted something with a lot of compartments and that would allow the school supplies to stand up right for easy selection.       

                                                         

We finally found these clear cosmetic organizers at Walmart in the bath section. I love them! They are heavy weight with handles and several different sized compartments. They however were a bit dull. I mean clear is clear and my girls were less than enthused about using them. Since I do like to keep my girls excited about school we splurged and bought some fancy duct tape to decorate the boxes.                                                              

When we got home the girls were chomping at the bit to get to decorating them. My 7 yr old had a bit of trouble controlling the duct tape so I helped her out on hers. My 10yr old however just needed a bit of assistance here and there. We covered the outside of each box, and my 10yr old decided the inside needed to be covered as well. One roll of the duct tape (about 6.5 feet) was plenty for the just the outside of the box but not quite enough if you wanted to do the inside as well. 

I also went through and put their initial on every single item in the box. On every crayon, marker, glue stick, etc. I find your school supplies on the floor and you are in deep doodoo. Our 7yr old has already lost one of her pencils and went searching behind the couch for it since she knew mom had counted the pencils and knew exactly how many were in the box.

I love that the boxes are portable and everything is in one place. No more searching for the crayons, or the markers, or goodness forbid you should need scissors or glue!  The girls are LOVING the boxes and they are coming in handy with our new approach to schooling: Notebooking. More about that to come in my next post however.