I have my 5 stations (see the post about them HERE). In each station is a tray for my pencils. In order to try to keep as many of my pencils in my room as possible, I put a small music note on each one. I have had pretty good success with that.
I know you see them all over Pinterest, but I made my own sharp/flat pencil labels. They are legal size because I wanted to put them on a little bit bigger can. I used a Bush Beans can, but noticed that Campbells family sized soups are also in the same can. I used my handy dandy laminator to laminate them although the laminating pages are only 8 1/2 x 11 size. My school doesn’t have a laminator for us to use. Then, I just put see through mailing tape on the back to seal it, hiding the unlaminated part underneath the overlapping label so you don’t notice that it isn’t laminated the whole way. Get your legal sized labels FREE HERE.
Kids are always wanting to sharpen pencils and it drives me crazy, so I plan to have the can of sharpened pencils and the “flat” pencil can available so they can put their dull ones into the one can and they can take a sharpened one out of the other. Once in a while, I will take the time to sharpen a bunch and not have to pay much attention to the pencil issue. 🙂