Color-coded kids??

How many times have you found a pair of scissors (or pencils, or cup, or ... you fill in the blank) in the living room and nobody will admit to leaving them there?  You don't know who it belongs to because it's just a pair of scissors. We resolved this in our house by having every kid pick a favorite color. Each child needs their own color and the colors should be basic, for instance "blue" and not "sky blue".

Once each child has a color, buy everything possible in each kid's color. Some examples of what we have done:

1. Drinking cups
2. Bath towel and washcloth (no they don't match the bathroom decor. We've learned to deal with it).
3. Pack of school pencils
4. Stapler
5. Paper clips
6. Tape dispenser
7. Pencil boxes for individual sets of Sharpies, markers, etc. (Each pen is color-coded too)
8. Scissors
9. Notebooks
10. Book covers
11. Boxes and bins to store stuff in in their room
12. Lunch containers
13. Travel mugs/cups

Following this color scheme, we can also mark items that normally couldn't be labeled. When we go camping or on a picnic and we go through several water bottles, we use colored pony-tail holders from the dollar store around the neck of the bottle. They are easily slipped on and off as we go through bottles.

When we traveled with younger kids, each of them had a rolling backpack or bin in their color (or with their color ribbons tied to the handle or striped in Duct Tape) to contain all of their stuff in the airplane or car.  When we used our travel currency, their assigned poker chip color was their everyday color at home.

Color-coding takes the guess work out of who the "lost" items belong to... if  a red stapler is found in the living room with no child in site, anybody who finds it knows to put it on the owner's desk chair (or a parent may confiscate it and know who to charge if they want it back - but that's another post).