Crayon Storage

I’m starting something new for my little blog; the last week of each month I’m going to focus on a different art supply, and how you can use that supply with your kiddos. This week will be all about crayons, which seems really simple, but I have a promise I have a lot to say about crayons!

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that you don’t have to use a specific type of crayon when you’re working with little ones.  While it may be easier for your youngest students, or those with fine motor delays, to hold on to chubby crayons we also want to make sure that we are introducing regular sized crayons.  They provide a challenge, and are a similar circumference to most regular pencil that children will use when they do move to kindergarten.

Now that we’ve gotten that conversation out of the way, I wanted to share some different ways that you could store all of your crayons.  Here are some options for keeping them organized in your supply closets, and for making sure that children can access them easily when they’re out on the shelf;

This one from Sugar Bee Crafts is one of the most popular on pinterest right now.  Its cute, it’s recycled (yay for cheap!), and the color coding helps children easily find the crayon that they want while practicing color matching and sorting.  I also love that you could easily pick up the entire unit and put it in the middle of the table so that children can work together.  Here is a another great color coded option from Play Based Classroom

This one would be super easy for little ones to use properly, and you could probably scavenge your classroom to find all of the materials that you would need to make it.

Here’s an idea that will help if you keep your crayons in a closet or in personal supply boxes:

Crayons will fit in a travel soap container! Thanks for the idea Mrs. King’s Music Room.

Here are some other easy storage ideas:

• Put out three or four plastic cups (a heavier plastic works best so that they aren’t constantly falling over) and empty one box of crayons into each cup.  This way children can take the entire cup when they want to color and there will still be crayons left for others. 
• use an over the door storage option (the kind that has pockets for shoes) and fill the pockets with boxes of crayons, markers, and colored pencils.  This makes it easy to see when you are running low on a specific supply. 
• Use canning jars (or empty peanut butter jars if you’d rather have plastic) to store items in the closet, when you’re ready to put them out on the shelf all you have to do is take the lid off.