Crayon Storage

I hate how cluttered my art center has always been. In the past, I have had a three shelf plastic drawer thingy, with one drawer for crayons, one for colored pencils, and one for markers. And three black stackable thingys (above) for lined paper, blank paper, and leftover worksheets. Five minutes of kids, and it is usually a mess. In browsing on pinterest, I have seen such great ideas for crayon storage that I just LOVED, particularly here: crayon organization.

I didn't want the narrow trays that she used, so I went to The Dollar Store and bought these squarish bins (3/$1). And I had a bunch of colored duct tape that I had found at The 99c Store a while back, so I used that instead of gluing colored paper to the bottoms, as the author did in the link above. I am hoping duct tape holds up longer than the paper would have-my kids can be hard on stuff!! So I put duct tape on the inside and the outside of the bin and added the crayons. I couldn't find brown duct tape when I went, so I used a giraffe print :-).

Then I went to this site and got Color Labels . I printed them out on white paper, cut them, and taped them to my bins (I opted not to print on sticky labels because I didn't want them to peel off-I think they'll hold better with packing tape over the duct tape). She has various sizes, so I also printed a smaller size and made crayon cups for when the kids are working with me or that I can put in a center. I got the cups/cup holder from Scholastic a year or so ago. It only has space for six, so I used leftover containers for black and brown. I LOVE both the bins and the cups!!

And so far, after two weeks of school, they both seem to be holding up pretty well. :-)
<3 Ms. Chase