Complimentary products received for review purposes. As always, all thoughts are my own.

I’m very fortunate to have made it all the way to first grade with my oldest before having a lengthy back-to-school shopping list for her.

One thing I quickly noticed is that her teacher requested that every single item she would be bringing into the classroom would be labeled with her name on it. I thought that sounded perfectly reasonable until I realized that this meant that every crayon, marker, pencil, eraser, etc. had to be individually labeled; labeling the box wasn’t sufficient!

Yesterday I stuck labels on 41 items, and I consider myself very lucky because that number could have easily been larger.

Perhaps what surprised me most of all, though, was that when I finished putting all the labels on, I still had a very ample supply of labels left over which will be great for anything new I have to send in later this year, and even for next year.

I used the school labels value kit from Bright Star Kids. Right now it’s $34.95 (on sale!) and it comes with 190 labels. You have the ability to customize the color, the design and even the font for your labels. I opted to only use my daughter’s last name on the label so that her little sister could use them, as well. Unfortunately, that means that I can’t show you our particular labels, but here’s an example of labels from the value kit:

My only complaint about Bright Star Kids is that my order took 2 weeks to arrive. It looked as though it was shipped internationally (perhaps from Canada? I can’t remember exactly) and I found that very confusing, since there is no mention on the website of the company being international. Since school is starting up soon for many people, I just wanted to give you a heads up that it might take a while for your order to come in.

Otherwise, I found the quality of the labels to be quite good, and  I expect this value kit to be able to get both of my girls through 2 years of school before it’s time to get more labels. I’m very pleased with the value!

Anyone else out there having to label individual crayons and the like? Is this the new normal?