Ribbon Organization

I'm always searching for more efficient ways to operate and I stumbled upon a great way to keep my ribbons neatly stored.  I regularly browse the fishing aisle in Walmart because of the neat little storage containers they have.  One lucky day I noticed an opaque plastic tackle box that was perfect for ribbon!  It was probably around $2, so I bought a couple.  I had previously unsuccessfully tried storing ribbon the cardboard floss cards and putting them in snack size ziploc bags on a metal ring, but it was too messy and the bags were prone to ripping off the ring.  Having hundreds of the cardboards cards already with my ribbon on them, this tackle box was ideal! 

These handy cards are found in the stitchery section of Walmart and Michaels.  You generally get about 100 per package and they are around $1.  As you may have anticipated, the unspooling and re-carding takes a bit of time, but I did it while watching tv or when I was stumped for inspiration.  With that finished, the ribbon fit rather nicely in the sections of the box.  

Each box will easily hold 100 spools of ribbon.  For ribbons that were longer than a yard, I rolled without a card and they fit much better.  Others I cut into 1 yd. sections to put on the cards.  I now have 5 of these boxes and I love how portable and neat my ribbons are.  The boxes are opaque and you can easily see through the top or sides to make selections easy.  The boxes also stack and store nicely on a shelf or in a drawer.

Guess who's not excited about teaching middle school kids...

You've guessed it, me.  There's a reason parents are equally  un-excited about these years of their children's lives and I'm beginning to understand why.  The adjustment from 2nd grade to 6th grade is coming along, but around Monday afternoon I knew I didn't want to be a middle school teacher and started the countdown.  I had seventeen sweet, little seven and eight year olds a week ago (well, sixteen excluding Delores who wasn't so sweet or little, for that matter), and now I'm supposed to be teaching 136 twelve year olds...  I guess I'd forgotten what it was like to be in middle school, and this little trip down memory lane isn't what I expected.  

The classes have 27 students each, last for 45 minutes, and right now the teacher spends half that time trying to get the kids to stop talking.  When they finally stop conversing with one another about who knows what, they decide to chime in the class discussion with whatever off the wall comment they can construe as remotely relevant to the topic.  The chapter they are covering now is dealing with weather, so the classroom discussion ranges from what they do when they get a snow day to aliens and spaceships.  Each class discussion is equally as strange and unrelated to the topic at hand as the next class, and this occurs five times a day.  That may be the part of middle school that I'm enjoying the least.  My teaching will involve one Health class first period and then five of the exact same Science lessons the rest of the day.  The only thing that worse than teaching the same lesson five times is sitting through it while someone else teaches the same lesson five time.  To top it all off, the Health chapters that we're covering are STDs and infectious diseases and Human Sexuality...  Just what I always hoped for!  Teaching sex education to hormone raging pre-teens.  I'm hoping the off-topic discussions continue through those lessons because I'm afraid to hear any on-topic comments they might have to share...