Crayon Boxes

Do you know what I dislike? (Okay...I do dislike people touching my hair when it's wet and I hate pointy things next to my eyes. I also do not like it when people break rules, but those are posts for another day.) I dislike crayon boxes.
I'm sure the lovely folks at Crayola make those boxes as best they can, but the cute cardboard boxes were not built for everyday classroom use. I just threw away all my crayon boxes from last year and every single one of them looked like it had been through, well, 35 different fourth graders.
Do you know what I dislike most of all? You know those times when a student is carefully and quickly cleaning up from coloring something and just as they jab the last crayon in the box, they jab a little too hard and the back comes off? Crayons are flying everywhere. Crayons do backflips and kung fu moves just to get out of that box (at least in my classroom).
I love all the soap boxes, in fact, the soapbox for crayons was one of my first pins. My only problem was finding a multitude of inexpensive soap boxes.

Then came the day I was perusing Dollar Tree's website and found these Lock-Top Snack Containers two pack...with lids. Could it be? Would that container possibly fit a heap of crayons?

After two Dollar Tree store stops, I found them! The only problem was that there were only 11 packages in stock and I would need at least 16. Instead of being impulsive and buying all they had on the spot, I just grabbed one to check it out.

I played with the snaps for a while and they appear to be sturdy and kid-friendly. As for the crayons, they fit 24 regular Crayola crayons without even breaking a sweat. (Although to see a plastic container sweat would be pretty strange.) Two for a single dollar?
Not too shabby.

*Small update: I went to four stores to get all the boxes I needed (they were out at two of the stores). A saleslady told me that these small boxes go very quickly whenever they get a shipment in.

Ruler container

I have been trying to find space saving and cute ways to store some of the school supplies my students will be using. Last year I worked with some of the 6th graders at my school and found that they hardly knew how to use a ruler so I knew I wanted to incorporate measurement just a bit more than the core suggests.

Cue the wine tubes I found for $2.00 at Joann's.

They are compact and one will fit about half of the rulers I need for my class. The only problem was that they needed a bit of a makeover. (The designs were cute but they had wine words on them.)

I grabbed some gray spray paint (leftover from my wedding last year; I love working with free tools) and got to spraying. I left the lids on so that the cute design would still be visible.
All I needed to do after that was apply vinyl. Because I felt as though I had been wasting lots of the space between vinyl letters lately, I took advantage of the letters and the outline this time. No wasted vinyl.

I think they will be just about perfect for what I made them for!

Linking up...

Made By You Mondays

Always in the middle...

Right now I seem to constantly be in the middle of crafts for my classroom. I have two piles in my living room right now. One pile holds completed crafts that are ready to head out to my classroom. The other pile is full of not yet started/in the middle of crafts.

I also usually have something drying in the middle of the floor. Like these:

I took some cheap 8x10 black plastic picture frames from the dollar store and tried giving them a worn, vintage look by not thoroughly painting them. I went over the frame with a sponge brush and some lovely light blue paint a couple of times, trying my hardest not to be OCD about thoroughly covering the frames so I got the sanded down look. (You know the look, where you paint a wood frame and then sand it a bit to give it an old look.) I think they look pretty good.
If you agree, then thank you very much.
If you disagree, then I just have to tell you they look better than in the pictures.
What am I turning these into? Have you seen the dozens of ideas on how to display your objectives? That's what these are going to become.

I also just finished this beaut:

My teacher toolbox.
Once again, just about every other teacher has been posting their own. I just wanted to use some vintage looking paper on mine and I replaced a couple of the smaller boxes for places to hold a small bottle of mod podge (something I can never be without) and brushes for the mod podge.
Ah, and the green words are actually more visible than they look. I promise. The paper has a shiny finish so it did not photograph very well.

For the larger green boxes, I cut the letters out of the paper itself (at my husbands suggestion) and then stuck a piece of white paper on the back, but it took forever to do. The pink went by much faster because I simply applied some vinyl. (That was my very first time cutting vinyl out. I am converted. I love vinyl. Even with these tiny letters I love it so much.)

Also sitting around waiting to be used is lots of fabric, a large painted picture frame, some clipboards, dowels, a pot, hundreds of pieces of paper, tape measurers, twine, and many other treasures.