You’ve seen my references from time to time on how a frugal living tip can be “another crayon in your crayon box.”

Here’s the explanation about crayon boxes, and how they relate to frugal living:

I volunteer as a Sunday School teacher. When I started doing this in the 1990s, I was at a church that didn’t have much of a budget for religious education. Each child had a textbook. There was a small closet with a limited amount of supplies. Most teachers provided story books and videos out of their own funds to use in the classroom.

I taught a first-grade class at that church for about four years.

The first year, I took a plastic tub and filled it with some boxes of crayons I bought during back-to-school sales: a 64-count box, a 48-count box, a couple of 24-count boxes and a couple boxes of specialty colors.

That’s the crayon bucket my students shared in class while working on their lesson pages or coloring pictures.

At the end of the year, I threw out the broken crayons. At the start of the year, I’d buy one or two boxes of 24 or 48 crayons to fill in the gaps. When we moved away, I handed down the crayons and about half of my personal supplies to my replacement.

Since moving to Monroe, I’ve taught or subbed Sunday School at various grade levels at our new church. This year, I had a first-grade class.

At our new church, there is a budget sufficient to provide the teachers with a big selection of paper, craft supplies, books, music CDs, posters and videos. I haven’t had to buy anything “extra” for use in my classroom, although I do bring my own coloring books or show-and-tell stuff from time to time.

And at the start of this school year, I was given a box of supplies that included a box of eight crayons for each student.

I tried out the crayon boxes for a week or so in the classroom, and I remembered very quickly why I didn’t like that arrangement.

Crayons break with regular use. Children get upset when a crayon is broken and don’t like to use it.

It doesn’t matter if you assign a box with his or her name on it and make the child responsible for taking care of that box. Crayons eventually do break, especially toward the end of the school year. The children will get sidetracked and poke through the teacher’s supply box to find the “good crayons.”

Besides, a box with only eight colors is pretty limiting for classroom assignments: If you are coloring a picture of Jesus talking to a group of children, what crayon do you use for the skin color of those people? If you are coloring a picture of an Advent wreath arrangement that has three purple candles and one pink candle, what crayon do you use for the candle that is supposed to be pink?

Ugh!

I went back to the routine that worked for my first-graders at my former church: crayon buckets with lots of colors.

I told the church secretary what I wanted to do. She and I went into the storage room and we found three small buckets.

I dumped all of my classroom crayons into those buckets.

Then I went to another shelf in the storage room and found leftover crayons from previous years piled in two large plastic containers. A lot of those crayons were broken. A lot of them were the same basic eight colors I already had. I dumped all the crayons on the floor, tossed out the broken ones, and picked out as many extra colors such as gray, pink, white, peach, light brown and orange-yellow that I could find to put in my buckets.

There was no money out of my pocket, or the church budget, to make this change.

The next Sunday, I explained to my students our new routine with the crayons. They liked it! If the textbook activity called for one red crayon and one yellow crayon, there were enough of the basic colors to go around. And when a student wanted a gray crayon or a different shade of green to work on a coloring page, she could find such a crayon in one of the buckets we shared.

Now, how does my classroom story relate to frugal living?

Just as it takes more than one color of crayon to make the black and white depictions on a coloring page look good, it takes more than one money-saving tactic to create a frugal lifestyle.

Some tactics are things that your family does all the time, or have long had in your routine. That’s your family’s equivalent of the basic colors you find in an eight-count box of crayons. For my family, those crayons include:

• Yellow: Maintaining and using a coupon box for grocery purchases.
• Blue: Taking advantage of the tax-free Flexible Spending Account for out-of-pocket medical expenses.
• Green: Living in the city where our family has easier access to community services as compared to families who live in the suburbs or townships.
• Purple: Driving four-door sedans and hatchback cars rather than big vehicles.
• Red: Making handmade greeting cards rather than sending store-bought cards.
• Orange: Making good use of hand-me-downs and second-hand resources for household items, electronics and clothes.
• Brown: Seeking out the “best value for the money” when we need to make big purchases or service upgrades.
• Black: Bundling up errands on out-of-town trips.

I’ve been adding to my crayon box during the past couple of years:

• Pink: Participating in the drugstore rebate programs.
• Gray: Planning my shopping trips based on what sales match up with my needs for the week, rather than shopping only at the stores that I was more familiar with.
• Peach: Purchasing food from Angel Food Ministries.
• Dark green: Converting most of our light fixtures to CFL bulbs.
• Light green: Growing some edible plants this season.
• Gray: Reading what other personal finance and frugal bloggers are doing with their family budgets.
• Light brown: Researching financial aid options and scholarships for my college-age daughter and helping her get the paperwork filed on time.

Now, maybe you won’t use a light green crayon as often as you use a red crayon.

But it’s certainly to your advantage to have as many colors of crayons as possible in your frugal living crayon box.

You’ll be a lot happier with the results - just like my Sunday School students are when they are working on their coloring book pages.