Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Decluttering the Pencil Box

When a student keeps a huge amount of pencils, crayons, markers (thin and regular), erasers, pencil grips, scissors, wrappers.... in their pencil box, it takes forever to find a ready-to-use pencil or pink marker that still works.  Time to de-clutter!  We began by dumping the contents into a nearby tray.
This student quickly got into the spirit of "less is better" and speedily lined up her crayons by color.  She placed duplicates in her "extra" bag.  She toted extra pencils over to the classroom share basket.
Since we were short on time I acted as her assistant and tried out each marker to make sure it was worth keeping.
We even found the "lost" pencil grips that she was using on a trial basis.  One went in the extra bag which is stored in the classroom.

We had extra time after all, so we cleaned out her backpack, as well.  The student seemed to enjoy organizing her stash so maybe there will be some carryover?????

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just found your website today. Thank you for sharing your ideas and taking the time to post pictures during your sessions! I will definitely try some of them.

The pencil case activity is so important for many students. Maybe the student can make one or 2 compartments in the pencil case in a future session.
I once helped a student organize his backpack, he had 41 pencils in it! (and wanted to keep them all there!)