Average tshirt sizes for elementary-aged kids

January 6, 2013 2:58 PM

Looking for a chart or opinions on good average sizes to best suit a random sampling of elementary school kids.

I need to provide t-shirts for a few kids in each grade, grades K-5, without knowing whom I'm buying it for ahead of time. Previous years have convinced me that I have absolutely no standard to go by, since with my own skinny kids as references I have bought too many dinky shirts. Ideally, what I'd base my order on would allot two sizes for each grade and I could total it up from there.

So as an example, it's obvious to me that a youth S is a safe bet for average kindergarteners, and I would also order M as the next size up. But my experience breaks down for any ages/grades after that.

This is the size chart for the brand I ordered last year: http://www.jerzees.com/29BR.shtml

posted by artifarce to clothing, beauty, & fashion (2 answers total)

For what it's worth, when I was a kid, baseball shirts (which were those you've linked to, I think) were distributed by lining everyone up by height and handing out numbers in sequence. Assuming you aren't ordering shirts for a baseball team, you could phone the park district or Little League or whoever and ask them, as they're presumably faced with a similar problem.
posted by hoyland at 4:18 PM on January 6

Also, if it helps, my experience as a parent in similar situations is that the adults buying the shirts are less concerned that the shirts fit than that the shirts not be too small. In other words, they seem to buy more of the larger sizes and not fret if some kids' shirts hang down to mid-thigh.
posted by not that girl at 6:23 PM on January 6