Colored Baggies for Classroom Management

Are you seeing this picture correctly? Do they make COLORED BAGGIES? Yeah, buddy. A wonderful parent brought a pack to school last year for their student’s school supplies. When we opened the box, my assistant was like… “Mary, have you seen this?” 

Colored Baggies

If you know me you know I have this “thing” for color-coding everything. So this was huge news. Well, I have been looking for them and looking for them. I have been saving my special colored baggies in a safe place and only using them when I really needed them. Then, this past week at Walmart, guess what I found? {here is a link to grab them online}

More Colored Baggies

 So I bought a box… Or two… or a lot. And no this isn’t all of the baggies I bought. They are like $2.88 a box of 80 baggies… and I have to have a stash at home AND school. When you open the box, this is what you see.

There are yellow, red, green, and blue baggies. They look darker in the box than they actually are. Here are the four colors when you lay them out. {The background is gray here.}

So How Do I Use Them?

First, I use them to sort student activities. When my students get to a center, they can each grab a different colored baggie and do the activity in the bag. These cards all contain the exact same greater or less than comparison cards, but they have different images in the middle.

In the colored baggies, these activities are even easier to grab and organize. Here is another example.

 What About These Additional Ideas?

1. Make reading strips with these.
2. Sorting activities would also be easy!
3. Make colored “nets” and added them to a sensory table.
4. Could we create special color-coded glasses to “read to room” with?
5. Use BLUE baggies to make cool fish bowls add some clear hair gel and some plastic fish counters.
6. Create some amazing colorful pocket chart activities with this as well as with fake magnifying glasses to “find” particular things on the pocket chart.

Organize Student Activities

Here is another way I use colored baggies. I use colored baggies to organize activities for my students. Here is a math activity for 4 students. Each student has the same activity, but each is color-coded in their own baggie! Talk about easy for the students to grab and use. And clean-up is a breeze!

I also organize all my Print & Play Packs by day into colored baggies as well. Here is an example of my School Rules Pack with daily activities divided into color-coded activities. 

What ideas do you have to utilize these colored baggies in your classroom?