This one’s for people who share my unnatural possessiveness toward pencils. In my school library, pencils walk away with alarming frequency. A yellow #2 looks a lot like every other one, after all.

My solution: pencil flags! The kids love getting picky-choosy about their favorite flags, but they also tend to return them more often. I glued little sayings and stickers on colored rectangles of paper and used strong packing tape to attach to the pencils. Now my library pencil jar is full!