Crayons!

So, this post will be fairly short and sweet.  I just wanted to share an idea that I saw on Pinterest and show you that I have tried it, and it does, in fact, work!  You may have seen the pin that someone shared a while ago where she used plastic soap boxes for individual crayon cases for each student.  I have always just dumped all of our crayons into each supply box for all to share.  This can sometimes get tricky if all the students need to use the same color at the same time, so I thought I would give the soap boxes a try.  Well--I am into my second half of the year using them, and they are working like a charm! The original post was right--a box of 24 Crayola crayons fits perfectly in the soap cases (I got mine at Wal-Mart for .97 cents each.)  The kids love them, and they seem to make life easier, along with allowing the students to keep up with their own crayons.  Now, there are times when I find crayons lying on the floor or on the table, and of course no one wants to claim them.  When that happens, they are picked up and put into a large crayon box on my teacher table.  If someone is missing a particular color, he/she just goes to the big crayon box and finds the necessary color and puts it in his/her own box.  How easy is that?  Here are a couple of pics to help explain: 

Also, I give each student a fresh box of crayons at the beginning of the year, and then again in January.  When they get the new box in January, I explain that I KNOW that they are now more responsible, so I know that they can do a better job than they did before keeping up with their crayons.  So far, so good!

Can I just close with one question?  Why is it that the BROWN and RED crayons are always the ones that seem to disappear into thin air?  If anyone knows the answer to that question, please let me know!