I was inspired to start keeping track of some of the neat teacher tricks and classroom hacks that I spotted during the next two years by buckets filled with pencil crayons in a kindergarten classroom.
I was teaching on-call in a classroom where I had previously worked, but the teacher had implemented a new idea for her students to share pencil crayons. Each morning, she places a small bucket of mixed crayons on the tables for the kindergarten students to use throughout the day. However, she had created a rainbow of pencil crayons on a special table out of little dollar-store buckets. (She went a step further and placed a plastic table cloth down and laid out paint chips of the colours in front of the buckets to help emphasize the variety of shades within each colour.) If I was to hazard a guess, she probably used the pencil crayons from the student’s school supplies (super smart).
The kindergarten students were extremely excited when they were permitted to use the pencil crayons. They took them out one at a time and knew exactly where to put them back when they finished.
I also felt that the arrangement of pencil crayons made it extremely simple for sanitization at the end of the day! A quick spray, and everything was nice and clean.
I think this would work very well on a smaller scale for individual work tables for crayons too! I’ve made my own kitchen utensil holders for my motorhome out of soup cans, and it might be a great recycling project for older classrooms.
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