Extra Cards
If you have daily attendance cards that need to be sent to the office, Elaine Bacsa of Miami suggest that you make photocopies of the cards as soon as you receive them. Put the copies in your substitute folder so that subs don't have to look for yours. The extra set also comes in handy if you misplace a card.
Potted Pens
Keep track of the pens students borrow in class by turning pens into "flowers" suggests Denise Pearson, a high school earth science teacher in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. She takes a regular and then uses green florist tape to attach an artificial flower (the bigger and more garish, the better) to the pen. She puts these "flower pens" in a clay pot on her desk for students to borrow as needed. The extra pens are unlikely to walk out of the room by mistake, she notes.