as a teacher i have to find products that work for me and my students. they are 4 turning 5 and oh so cute. but their little hands have a hard time with glue bottles, and i have a hard time with glue sticks that don’t work.

solution? Tombow MONO adhesive runners and glue sticks!

once the little ones get a feel for the applicators, what angle to hold it at, what direction to move it in,  and how much pressure they need to give to get the adhesive to come out, they are grabbing any scrap of paper they can find just to stick it together! now i will say, that i don’t put the adhesive runners out for everyday use, cause they would go a little crazy and they may need the 5 step plan for adhesive abusers! but when putting together paper bag puppets, cards or a quick stick for small items being sorted it is the best thing around. no drying times!

and the glue stick…oh the glue stick…how wonderful the yellow glue stick is that it doesn’t dry out! i put up the kids artwork on the walls and after a couple of weeks pieces will start falling off their beautifully crafted collage. the other glue sticks continue to dry, and will dry so much that it won’t hold the items to the paper anymore.and the best news of all it’s NON TOXIC! eat that paste eaters….actually, don’t, it still tastes pretty gross!

so instead, grab the yellow tube! it doesn’t get goopy like some other glue sticks i’ve tried either!

but you know that these aren’t just for kids in the classroom. i like a quick stick too! no white wet glue oozing off the edge of a project, or taking the time to roll clear tape when putting projects together. as a teacher i also do quite a bit of laminating. and call me a perfectionist, but i really don’t like the raised rectangluar shape that shows up when you’ve used clear tape to put two pieces of paper together and then laminated. i use my MONO permanent adhesive runner to keep the papers together, and then when it is laminated there is not a hint of any embossed/raised blemish on my work.

i know i have used many other Tombow products…MONO Aqua to repair broken toys (better to be a porous material), Powerbond to make a rotation chart by adhering laminated pattern papers to a foam core board, and using the MONO Multi to make clipboards for my assistant teachers! in this picture i decorated the front of a 4×6 photo album. i take pictures of the science related activities we do and put the pictures in here. i loved the sticker letters (doodlebug designs) but i was worried about little fingers picking at them. i coated the album cover with MONO Aqua, put my stickers down the way I wanted them, and then coated over the letters with the MONO Aqua again. i did this in august, and still seven months later my letters are still in tact.

so my advice, don’t hoard the Tombow, share it all around, even in the classroom!

are you a teacher? or have you used Tombow products for educational kinds of projects? let me know….i have a long career in the education system staring at me in the face!