Lending Protractors and Rulers to Students...How to Get Them Back!

 Every teacher knows this.  When you lend a ruler to a student (or ANYTHING for that matter), you don't always get them back.  Out of 29 kids in my room last year, I'd say a third didn't have rulers or protractors to work with during math class, even though I gave them each one at the beginning of the year.  Seriously.  What do they do with these things?  How is it that I hand out 29 rulers and protractors and I still have to lend out 10-12 each math lesson?  Yet, when I get them to clean their desks out, NOBODY has any of MY STUFF!  I was getting incredibly frustrated.

Then I remembered this trick that a colleague showed me a few years back.  She taught in Grade 8.  Whenever she would hand out a protractor to a student, they would give her one of their shoes.  She stored them under her desk.  When they returned the protractor, they got their shoe back.  GENIUS!

I tried it with my 9 and 10 year olds this year and it worked like magic!  No more lost (or stolen) rulers and protractors!  And Manda Panda loves guarding the shoes while the kids work.

I only had one little girl who was  concerned about the fact that she was taking off her shoe.  She was worried about having a fire drill and not wearing both her shoes.  I simply told her that she could avoid this all together by having her own supplies and taking care of them!  Problem solved!

Do you have a fun way of keeping track of your class supplies?