Does your kids lose clothing at school?

[alice]

There is a new way to label your childrens clothing now. It requires no
ironing or sewing.
Just peel and stick on. Have any of you tried it yet? It is sold at
labellighthouse.com
It is great.

[Barbara]

alice wrote:
> There is a new way to label your childrens clothing now. It requires no
> ironing or sewing.
> Just peel and stick on. Have any of you tried it yet? It is sold at
> labellighthouse.com
> It is great.

Much as I hate responding to SPAM ... the entire contents of the lost
and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.

(BTW, we've found identical sweatshirts several times since the loss I
mentioned. Two out of three had names in them, and were returned to
their rightful owner by One. The last is still in the lost & found.)

Barbara

[[email protected]]

Barbara wrote and I snipped:
> the entire contents of the lost
> and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
> parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
> hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
> the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
> name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.

I really don't get this. Who would take something to the lost & found
if it had a name in it? Don't people even look? I was astonished to
find that the jacket DS left in his classroom, that had his name in it,
was delivered to the school's lost & found. I can't abide such
laziness.

-Patty, mom of 1+2

[Caledonia]

wrote:
> Barbara wrote and I snipped:
> > the entire contents of the lost
> > and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
> > parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
> > hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
> > the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
> > name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.
>
> I really don't get this. Who would take something to the lost & found
> if it had a name in it? Don't people even look? I was astonished to
> find that the jacket DS left in his classroom, that had his name in it,
> was delivered to the school's lost & found. I can't abide such
> laziness.
>
> -Patty, mom of 1+2

I'm confused -- what's lazy about a 4th grader finding something in a
corner of the gym, and taking it to the 'lost and found' -- or should
the 4th grader go to the office, ask the office to look up the child's
name and homeroom, then go to the homeroom and either interrupt the
instructor, or start opening and closing lockers to find the right one?

Our lost and found operates on a fashion similar to Barbara's -- and
although we've lost things several times (all with names on them), they
were all found later at the ...lost and found.

I truly don't see how laziness comes into it.

-M.

[Caledonia]

wrote:
> Barbara wrote and I snipped:
> > the entire contents of the lost
> > and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
> > parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
> > hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
> > the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
> > name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.
>
> I really don't get this. Who would take something to the lost & found
> if it had a name in it? Don't people even look? I was astonished to
> find that the jacket DS left in his classroom, that had his name in it,
> was delivered to the school's lost & found. I can't abide such
> laziness.
>
> -Patty, mom of 1+2

How does laziness come into it?

The typical thing that happens is a jacket is left on the playground, a
kid from another class finds it, and takes it to the 'lost and found'.


It seems really disruptive for the finder to instead take it to the
office, ask the front office staff to look up the owner's classroom,
then go to the owner's classroom and either interrupt the class or
start going through all of the proximate lockers to find the 'right'
one. Our school is relatively small (~70 kids/grade, 5 grades), yet I
can't see how a typical 'finder' would just know where to take the lost
item.

We've 'lost' a zillion things, all labelled with names, and have found
them all at the ....lost and found.

Caledonia

[Rosalie B.]

wrote:

>Barbara wrote and I snipped:
>> the entire contents of the lost
>> and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
>> parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
>> hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
>> the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
>> name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.
>
>I really don't get this. Who would take something to the lost & found
>if it had a name in it? Don't people even look? I was astonished to
>find that the jacket DS left in his classroom, that had his name in it,
>was delivered to the school's lost & found. I can't abide such
>laziness.
>
If your kid is so spacey that he/she leaves their clothing everywhere,
why should the person that finds it bother to try to track him/her
down? He/she will probably just lose it again.

So the trick really is to get the kid to keep track of his/her stuff.
It isn't the finder's job to do that and I don't really know how they
would do it anyway. The laziness is NOT on the finder's part.

Having said that, I don't think I lost many clothes but I lost an
incredible number of pens with my name on them (back in the days when
we had fountain pens where you filled them from an ink bottle).

My son lost a whole suitcase and at least one pair of shoes, but that
was not at school, or at least not at his school. He would decide to
run away from home (he was about 5) and would start off and see that
the pool across the street (on the grounds of a Catholic HS) where we
had a family membership was open, so he'd undress down to his bathing
suit and leave the suitcase and clothes and shoes somewhere and go
swimming. By the time he got back, he'd have forgotten that he was
running away.
..

[-L.]

alice wrote:
> There is a new way to label your childrens clothing now. It requires no
> ironing or sewing.
> Just peel and stick on. Have any of you tried it yet? It is sold at
> labellighthouse.com
> It is great.

Those look really stupid, and expensive, plus it would drive my kid
nuts - he hates tags as it is and I have to cut them all out of his
shirts. I use a fabric pen to write the size of the shirt on the
inside of the collar - I could just as easily label his clothing with
his name in the same manner. A fabric pen costs under $2.00 and can be
used a hundred times or more.

-L.

[Cindy Kandolf]

writes:
> Barbara wrote and I snipped:
> > the entire contents of the lost
> > and found at One's school was spread out on tables during
> > parent-teacher conferences. We went through it pretty carefully in
> > hopes of finding a sweatshirt that One lost. I'd estimate that 90% of
> > the items had kids' names in them. The trick isn't putting your kid's
> > name on items, its getting your kid to check the lost & found.
>
> I really don't get this. Who would take something to the lost & found
> if it had a name in it? Don't people even look? I was astonished to
> find that the jacket DS left in his classroom, that had his name in it,
> was delivered to the school's lost & found. I can't abide such
> laziness.

If it was really left in his classroom, I agree it's odd that it was
delivered to lost and found. However, at my boys' school, most of the
clothing that ends up in lost and found is either 1) taken off in the
playground at recess and then forgotten, or 2) dropped to the floor in
a cloakroom and then kicked around, accidentally or otherwise, until
it is no longer anywhere near where it started. When something is
found in that situation, it's much simpler for everyone to deliver it
to L&F. Since it's a small school (about 70 kids in two multi-age
groups), a teacher might take a stray piece of clothing to the
appropriate classroom if it's marked with a name, but it's a bit much
to expect kids or parents to do that, or anybody to track down the
specific cloakroom space for every item. In a school with 500+ kids
and 21 classrooms, like another of our local schools, I imagine
*everything* goes to L&F.

- Cindy Kandolf, mamma to Kenneth (12) and Robert (6)
****** Bærum, Norway
Bilingual Families Web Page:
http://www.nethelp.no/cindy/biling-fam.html

[Cindy Kandolf]

"alice" > writes:
> There is a new way to label your childrens clothing now. It requires no
> ironing or sewing.
> Just peel and stick on. Have any of you tried it yet? It is sold at
> labellighthouse.com
> It is great.

Er, yeah. If a glue really did exist that would stick to common
fabrics, and *stay* stuck in the wash, the clothing industry would be
all over it. Since they haven't discovered it, I have to believe
these things will be littering the washing machine a few weeks after
application, at best.

Personally, I put my trust in:
1) a laundry pen where possible; then
2) GOOD iron-on labels; then
3) a cloth label/plastic clip set.

However, after four months of working in a preschool, I'm just happy
when parents label stuff - in a place I can find the name quickly, and
with the child's own name or at least a sibling's (as opposed to the
cousin, neighbor, or friend's kid who was the original owner of the
jacket or what have you). And not just clothes; after a picnic
lunch at the playground, it's no joke trying to figure out who owns
each of eight unlabelled and nearly identical stainless steel
thermoses...

- Cindy Kandolf, mamma to Kenneth (12) and Robert (6)
****** Bærum, Norway
Bilingual Families Web Page:
http://www.nethelp.no/cindy/biling-fam.html

[Cathy Kearns]

"Cindy Kandolf" > wrote in message
...
> "alice" > writes:
> > There is a new way to label your childrens clothing now. It requires no
> > ironing or sewing.
> > Just peel and stick on. Have any of you tried it yet? It is sold at
> > labellighthouse.com
> > It is great.
>
> Er, yeah. If a glue really did exist that would stick to common
> fabrics, and *stay* stuck in the wash, the clothing industry would be
> all over it. Since they haven't discovered it, I have to believe
> these things will be littering the washing machine a few weeks after
> application, at best.
>
> Personally, I put my trust in:
> 1) a laundry pen where possible; then
> 2) GOOD iron-on labels; then
> 3) a cloth label/plastic clip set.
>
My mother used to embroider our names in 1 inch high letters into the inside
back of our school uniform sweaters. We never lost one for long. It seems
no one else wants your sweater if your name is that big and that hard to
take out.

But back to the original quest, how do you get kids to not lose clothing.
I'm pretty sure it has little to do with labeling and more to do with
getting the kids to feel responsible enough to keep track, or at least go
looking for their own stuff. Unfortunately that a parenting job, no gadgets
help here.