Thread: One of my students is stealing my stuff!

That's a hard one. I'd have a talk with the class about how I spend my own money on many of the items in the class. For many of them, taking a pencil or a Goosebumps book from the classroom doesn't feel like stealing. They see them as supplies that the school has purchased and that no one will notice. I do make a big deal about howmany of our free reading books have been purchased by me, with my own money, and I tend to get them back.


We've also had a problem with dry erase markers. I've heard that the kids are using them to make "super markers" with glue somehow, for tagging. Perhaps you could make them hard to slip out the door, like with giant feathers glued on the back of them or something? If you ask the secretary at my school to borrow a pen, she hands you one that is about 18 inches long and has plastic flowers taped on it-- you won't forget that it's hers and walk away with it.

Just do not leave anything beyond your grasp, and don't take anything to school you can't live without. As for your dice, sounds like you are using D&D dice....you can buy those online, and have them delivered....:
[url="http://www.toywiz.com/dddudrbco.html"]http://www.toywiz.com/dddudrbco.html[/url]

What a shame that things are walking out of your class.

Just out of interest - how do you get a four sided dice? I can only imagine six sides and more ;P

What I'm doing now is keeping all my dice in my pocket and keeping all the markers (except one) in a pencil box. Still, I have two or three kids complaining that they've lost their erasers/pencils/markers after putting them in their boxes. The fingers are being pointed at one girl but I've never seen anything in her box or desk that doesn't belong to her.

My other prime suspect is out sick the last three days and I'm keeping a close watch on the mean kid who delights in seeing what he can do without me seeing him. He gets sent out of the room daily for disclipline problems, along with a phone call home most of the time. I suspect he likes to lash out after being caught for lashing out.

Just out of interest - how do you get a four sided dice? I can only imagine six sides and more ;P

They can be bought at gaming specialty stores that sell wargames, comics, and the like. They're usually about a dollar each.

The common dice are 4 (pyramid of four triangles), 6 (cube), 8 (two pyramids stuck together, 10 (kind of a diamond shape, 12 (a dodecahedron) and 20-sided (made of more triangles), but there are 30-sided and 100-sided dice.

For math problems I roll two d10s, which give me a two-digit number. The 100-sided is more of a novelty. It's almost perfectly round so when you roll it it goes off the table, across the floor, and into the nearest wall. Then it's on an edge so you have to roll it again. In that time I could have rolled my 2d10s about six or eight times.

So young.

If the finger is being pointed at one girl you have to either nail her or get her off the hook by doing a bag search with the principal there. Talk to her while you have her empty her pockets away from the other students. Maybe she will fess up.

Hope you get it solved.

My purple marker disappeared today. For some reason I just don't see things. I find Doritos wrappers in desks all the time but I've never once seen a kid eat a snack in class. Same with the candy wrappers. I don't know how I'm going to catch someone stealing a marker.

Maybe I can put some indelible ink on a marker as a trap. Or to be cruel, I can fill up a dead marker with india ink and a drill a few strategically-placed holes. Then I just see who gets stained clothes.

I like the indelible or invisible ink idea. As much as I'd like to humiliate the culprit in front of everyone, I'd ask everyone to visit me outside one by one while they're doing seatwork and discuss the problem in the hall. That way parents won't call complaining that their kid was humiliated when he/she didn't have to be.

The question is, how do you know when to check? It'd look kind of silly to have to go through that process more than once.

EDIT: It's early and I can't spell.

I caught someone on Friday. She was one of my suspects.

One of my students forgot his glasses and needed to go back to the classroom after school. But they were not where he put them. Normally I would figure he'd just lost them but a girl's glasses were stolen a couple of months ago and never found.

We made sure they were not in his backpack or adjacent desks.

Then I saw the girl who sits next to him out on the playground (I have my students seated in pairs). I asked her if she saw who had his glasses last. She immediately told me the name of her friend and another girl who was also out playing. I didn't want to guess which backpack was her friend's so I asked if she could search her friend's backpack for me. There were no glasses in that packpack so I asked her if I could check her packpack, "just in case someone put them in your backpack to get you in trouble"

She said yes but that she wanted to search. Of course, I put my hand down in her back also and immediately found my other students' glasses. Then she gave a name of a third student who might have done that, which I don't believe for a second.

This student is usually friendly but has looked for ways to test the limits. In the beginning of the year I needed to call her parents about her behavior and she cheerfully told me they don't have a phone (which was true) but once the phone was fixed I made contact and her behavior improved.

But apparantly she's been stealing things for the thrill of getting away with misbehavior.