Let's Talk About School Supplies!

 It's time to get ready for the new school year. What do we need for supplies this year?

There are so many ways I could tackle this, I almost don't know where to start. So... I thought I'd start at Kindergarten.  When my oldest was starting home school in Kindergarten, we had no spare money. We didn't earn all that much and, frankly, we hadn't been planning to home school. I had wanted to; my husband hadn't. My daughter's birthday fell one day late to start Kindergarten in Colorado that year, so she wasn't in public school. In January we decided to "do school" so my daughter would have something to do and so my husband could see if I had the discipline to do this thing.


So that year our school supplies were those things that we already had (scrap paper, pencils, crayons, scissors and glue, and household items) and lots and lots of library books. A friend gave me her old school planner (photo is a different planner), 

and I reused it and made it my own. Using a library copy of The Writing Road to Reading, I taught my daughter how to read and write by June. It also taught her how to write numbers. We counted any and everything, and did things with patterns. We learned shapes and did art with shapes - squares, diamonds, squares, rectangles, glued in collage to make houses, flowers, etc.

So, in those early years that was our general pattern. Each year we had certain things that we liked to buy new, and always we used up whatever we had. Friends with money bought cute little counting bears and snap-together cubes in sets of ten for math.

It took us many years to afford such luxuries. We collected caps from milk bottles for counters. We also loved our button jar. We could count, sort by size, sort by color, make necklaces with patterns -- lots of fun. We liked to go on field trips, too. When we were going on a day trip, first we would make each girl a snack necklace on plastic lace strung with Fruit Loops. This was a rare treat in our house, so that made it very special.

By 3rd Grade I felt like we had "arrived" because we could afford to buy a nice 3-ring notebook for my oldest with dividers. My 1st grader still didn't need it and didn't care. We did kitchen experiments from library science books. We did art from household items - cereal boxes make great cardboard constructed buildings. Egg shells can be turned into sidewalk chalk. White glue and liquid starch make home-made Silly Putty! Mudworks was a veritable wealth of tactile ideas for gooey, slimey and playdough recipes! We got Mudworks at the library, of course. And we loved all our books - the ones from the library and the ones from my childhood home!

Well, I had a lot more written here, but it disappeared into the blogosphere. It is County Fair week, and I can't reconstruct it. So here is where I fast forward to this year.
 

This year my son is taking Bible at home and finishing up Chemistry lab experiments. At the local community college he is taking Biology and Spanish 2 this fall, and Public Speaking and hopefully a college level math in the spring. At our local home school group he is taking Geometry.

He needs spirals and a 3-ring binder with dividers (easy peasy). He needs pencils, red pencils, protractor, compass, 

ruler, paper, etc. 


I still need to get his class-approved calculator, but mostly we're ready. His Spanish course uses the same book as Spanish 1 used, and his Biology materials are all online. We need to pick a 3-ring binder from around the house. We might buy more binder paper.

So how about your house? What is an essential school supply for you this year?