I have four children.  Now, for some of you, that’s not a lot.  But it’s enough of them for school supplies to get mixed up, and mixed-up school supplies can lead to fights.  One child sits down to do schoolwork, doesn’t have any glue, insists it isn’t her fault — somebody stole it — you get the idea.

So our school supplies are color-coded.  Ariel’s are blue/turquoise, Sophia’s are pink, Livia’s are orange, and Caleb’s are green.  This way if someone’s glue turns up in someone else’s box, it’s obviously stolen.  If something gets accidentally mislaid, we know who to return it to.  (Devious children could un-color-code things and still steal them, but that takes a whole other degree of deceitfulness and we haven’t had that problem.)

Some items are fairly easy to color-code.  Scissors, for instance.  I always buy Fiskars for kids, because I’ve consistently found them to work (no chewing up the paper), but I’ve been able to find every color we need.  Some items are not so simple, though.  Glue sticks and colored pencils, for instance, all look pretty much alike.  Other things, like mechanical pencils, do come in a variety of colors, but may or may not be the colors we need.  Our solution has been electrical tape.

Different brands come in different colors (that’s why our pink tape is a little narrower than the others), but you should be able to find a pretty wide variety if you search.  We ordered all of ours from Amazon and, although we had to wait a little bit for all of it to ship from various sellers, we’ve been using the same rolls of tape for three years now and still have plenty left!  You can buy the tape we did: pink, orange, green, blue — but it comes in lots of others colors, too.

Now, if you clicked through all those links (and I totally understand if you didn’t!), you may have noticed that there are two major ways of describing this tape.  Some of it is described as colored “electrical tape,” but some of it is listed as “vinyl marking tape.”  So if you’re looking for a particular color, try searching for both terms before you decide it doesn’t exist.  I’m seeing at least eighteen colors, so most families should be able to find enough variation to cover their needs. 🙂