Keeping the Piece

My Kinders enjoy working with scissors and glue.  But, if you have ever worked with Kinders, scissors, and glue you know what a messy endeavor it can be.  Pieces fall on the floor, get mixed up with the neighbor's pieces, get thrown into the recycling bin, etc.  Finally I have come up with a simple solution to these woes!  (Why did it take me so long??)

The solution is as simple as mushroom containers and dish tubs!  We eat lots of mushrooms at our house, and one day as I was cleaning some for our salad I thought that the container they came in seemed too nice to just throw away.  (The teacher in me is always coming up for a way to re-purpose things.)  So, I started saving them.  Well, because we eat SO MANY mushrooms it didn't take very long to collect a class set (or two).

These little blue foam containers are the perfect size for holding small pieces of just about anything. Whenever the kiddos need to cut out small pieces they grab a blue tub.  By putting their pieces into a tub there are far fewer lost pieces!

But, it still wasn't totally fool proof.  Plus, there was a constant march to and from the recycling bin that sits just outside our classroom door.  (My husband is in the paper recycling business and we RECYCLE EVERY SCRAP OF PAPER!  I used to bring paper home to recycle before our school started the recycling program.)  There was also the occasional piece that got mixed in with the recycling.  In comes the dish tubs!  Each table has a pink scrap tub to collect scraps as the kids cut.  If a piece is accidentally mixed in with the recycling it is so much easier to find in the pink tub!

The solution was so simple ~ and inexpensive ($0.00 for the mushroom containers, and a couple dollars for each tub) ~ I can't believe it took so long to come up with this idea! 

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