"Friday Box"

Do your students have a hard time keeping track of their things? Every day at the end of the day, I go around picking up glue sticks, scissors, dry erase markers, pencils, etc. (even though we have two floor cleaner class jobs that are supposed to do this!). My students are losing things like crazy! To teach them the importance of taking care of their things, I introduced them to the "Friday Box" this week.

The Friday Box is just a container where things that are found on the floor or out of place are kept until the end of the week. If a student loses their glue stick on Monday, they don't get it back until Friday. When I explained this to the class, you would've thought the world stopped turning! Instantly, they started asking "What do I do without a glue stick for the entire week?" or "What if I left my eraser on the floor. How can I fix my mistakes?" I told them that they would have to be problem-solvers and figure out a way such as borrowing, etc. Now I know this may sound a little tough but for some of my kids, not being able to find something that they lost was wasting SO much time. I introduced this box on Tuesday of this week and it has already made a HUGE difference in the amount of items found around the classroom. We did have a pretty good collection going though- pencils, scissors, glue sticks, bookmarks, chap stick, Pokemon cards, among many other "treasures". Today, the kids got their things back at the end of the day. I saw some of them putting their materials in their pencil boxes right away and pushing it towards the back of the desk. I really hope this helps them develop resposibility for their things! We'll see how next week goes =)