Pencil Classroom Management that WORKS!

Pencil classroom management is a tough thing to figure out! Especially in middle school! I don’t think anyone understands the pencil struggle like a teacher does. Before I officially had my first classroom, I started to collect as many pencils as I could. But as you know, teaching is one of those things that you think you can prepare for, but things don’t always go as planned! I had the pencils but I would just give them out whenever and they quickly disappeared.

I’m grateful for my resourceful students who would use pens, markers, colored pencils, and even dry erase markers (cringe) before asking for a pencil. But by golly, this just doesn’t always work in a math classroom.

I’m not usually one to deny a kid a pencil, but they weren’t treating my precious pencils with care! Being the nice teacher that I am, I usually tell them to keep them so they have a pencil in their next class too. But can you believe it, I started finding the pencils discarded on the floor! Talk about heartbreak.

I have a student in one period who collects every pencil he finds in the classrooms/hallways. Before classmates can even finish their sentence, “I don’t have a…”, he instantly appears with a handful! He has like 100 pencils in his pencil pouch, yall. Not even kidding. But unfortunately, I don’t have him in every class period. 

I have tried just about every pencil classroom management idea out there:

• Pencil docking station
• Write my name on every pencil
• Hang them on the board and have kids sign them out
• Golf pencils

But nothing has worked as well as this!

💡I came across an idea on Instagram to create “Pencil Flowers!” shared from @MissKuiper on Instagram!

The idea was to grab flower stems from your local craft store or Dollar Tree and attach them to pencils with floral tape.

You will also need magnet clips and pencils, of course! (affiliate links) I used washi tape for the outline!

I modified it a little bit because I didn’t have time to go to Dollar Tree, I needed the problem solved right away!

So… I cut out some little squares of construction paper and folded them accordion style and taped it to pencils with scotch tape.

One downside of my method is that the eraser is unusable, whoops. But, it encourages them not to keep the pencils so it works.🤷‍♀️

She suggests also having students write their names on the board once they sign it out. I skipped this step and it seems to be fine.

One of my many classroom jobs is “Clean Up Crew” and that student is responsible for double-checking that all three pencils are returned to the board at the end of the period.

I did this back in early November and I have not lost a single pencil since, and it’s January!!

If you try this pencil classroom management idea, will you let me know how it goes?