Winning the Pencil War

Every teacher understands the frustration of pencils.  You want your kids to do their work, but you want them to have their own supplies.  There are always those kids that don't have pencils though.  Unfortunately, with my kids, pencils during the first semester disappeared all the time.  I tried multiple things.  Leave a shoe, take a pencil for you definitely didn't work for me because I didn't have time to keep up with it.  Kids would take pencils out of the classroom constantly.  I found that I was going through 50 pencils a month.  Seriously, that is ridiculous.  *New teacher prob!*

I found something on Pinterest that has saved my life in regards to pencils.  You can see that link here.  The basic idea is that the kids take a pencil off the board, but no one gets to leave the classroom until the pencil is back.  I have mine near my door in a place I can see from any point in the classroom.  I have found that once students know that no one can leave, they tend to make sure the pencil gets back one way or another.  I have had the same five pencils for over six weeks.  I just recently replaced them with mechanical pencils now that the system is working.

In the idea on Pinterest, they used a ribbon to hold it up.  I just used the command hooks meant for hanging picture frames.  Those are life savers.

Do you have any tricks for keeping the pencils in your classroom?  Please share in the comments below.