Teacher Tuesday: recorder karate part 2- belt storage

Welcome back to Teacher Tuesday! Earlier this year I shared my current system for organizing and storing the students' sheet music for the Recorder Karate program. I've included the link to that post at the end of this one so you can read more about it if you're interested. Today's post is about my new recorder belt storage solution!

Last year I started using loom bands as my "belts" and it was the best.decision.ever. No more cutting little pieces of yarn, no more tying things onto hundreds of recorders, no more running out to the store early in the morning because you didn't know your yellow yarn was almost gone. So much easier. The only tiny problem:

This whole loom band thing happened in the middle of the school year last year, just as I was getting ready to start the program, so I didn't have time to get everything as organized as I would have liked. I went through the whole year last year with the loom bands in the flimsy little plastic bags in which they were packaged, and kept them all corralled in a tissue box with the top cut off (yep.). Not the best way to have quick and easy access to the belt I need when a student completes a test, and not the easiest thing for me to carry around when I am listening to students play for their tests.

Enter the pill box.

Some of you may have seen my Mommy Monday post on how I store my kids' hair elastics:

It wasn't until I wrote that blog post that I made the connection to storing my recorder belt storage- those hair elastics are basically the same thing as the loom bands I use at school! (And this is precisely why I break the "first rule of blogging" and blog about two topics- home and school- because I find so many connections between the two! If nothing else, blogging about both has already helped me come up with great ideas myself!)

At first I was thinking about having 2 of the same round pill boxes that I used for the hair elastics, but I quickly realized that those would also be cumbersome to carry around when I am testing. The next idea I had was to get one of those giant ones with multiple boxes for every day of the week, but I didn't really want something that big. When I was at the drug store, looking for something else, I came across this and realized it was exactly what I needed:

It's so much smaller. It only has 8 compartments, but I really don't need to carry around the white belts because I have my students earn that first belt as a class before I turn them loose on the rest of the belts. Now I have something that fits easily in my pocket, and gives me easy access to whichever color I need:

I'm able to fit about 20 of each color comfortably in this container. I am keeping the rest of the bands in the same tissue box and will replenish in between classes as needed. 

If you want to read about how I organize the sheet music for recorder karate, head on over to this post:

How do you organize your belts for recorder karate? Share your ideas in the comments or head on over to my facebook page to join the conversation there!