One of my greatest personal challenges as an art teacher is organization. Surprise, surprise! At any given time I have tons of "stuff" that is a real pain to manage because of just how much of it I have. I won't go as far as to say that I am a hoarder but, well... I guess I sort of am. As it works though, I think this might be a problem that most any art teacher has. There are just always bits and bobs and things that I might collect at any given time because... oh, I don't know - I might really need any one of things to make something!!!
Anyway, sometime last year I invested in Bic Mark-it 24 Color marker sets. They happened to be on sale (don't remember the price but it was AMAZING!) so I plunked down the money and got somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 sets. (I KNOW!!! Cool, eh?) The students have loved using them (this is our third major project for them) and they have really held up for us to be able to get some solid use from them for another go-round. My only complaint? They are a pain to manage when it comes to keeping them in sets. No matter what I do to try and keep them in individual sets, it just doesn't work and I end up after class/at the end of the school day sorting them with the always faithful and wonderful art students who gather to socialize. *sigh*
After doing the above for close to a week and being annoyed beyond belief, it hit me that instead of just throwing them all into a big bin that will make it even harder to find the colors that you might want to use, why not save the cases and then sort them by their chromatic groupings/pairings! And voila!! We had a new system that not only works but is really easy to manage.
In the future I might do this for all coloring materials that are not paint. It just works well and I'm all about well-oiled systems like that.
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