Homeschool Supplies

So it’s that time of year again.

Or is it?

We are schooling year-round. Which means we are still working this summer because we took off a lot of time during the year! But that’s okay, that’s why we get to choose our schedule.

No matter how you run your homeschool, there’s no denying that school supplies are at their least expensive when the public school year is about to begin.

We walked into the grocery store last week and grabbed several boxes of crayons (can you ever have too many crayons?), $.30 notebooks (I seem to collect cool notebooks), and these Ticonderoga pencils. I’ve read about these pencils so many times but have never tried them.

Ticonderoga Pencils

Honestly, I couldn’t figure out what all the hype was about. They aren’t made of some space-age, non-breakable material, they don’t make my handwriting any more legible and they don’t have a built-in calculator.

But they do write pretty dang nice. The lead makes the marking dark and thin. It’s almost like writing with an ink pen, even after writing for a while. The lead never gets wide and soft. This means I can read my son’s handwriting and clearly see the separation between words. With a regular pencil, his sentences turn into one giant word when his pencil becomes dull.

The erasers are good too – unlike some of the cool looking pencils I’ve gotten that seem to have a petrified piece of old rubber that creates marks all over the paper.

I’ll give these Ticonderoga pencils a big thumbs up. I’d give them two thumbs up if they’d come in glittery colors.

Glitter Pencils

Speaking of glitter, these are the pencils I have on my own desk. My daughter likes them too. My son refuses to touch the glitter and uses whatever happens to be within reach. He likes to sharpen them down to about 2 inches. Yes, I love homeschooling.

Glittery Notebooks

If you also enjoy glittery things, these notebooks are cute. I have a ton, but I didn’t pay that price from Amazon. The only place around here to buy school supplies in-store is Wal-Mart (blah), but these same notebooks are less than $1.00, so I can’t complain.

Get the Glue

Don’t forget Elmer’s Glue! We are always late to the game, so we just made our first batch of the trendy slime this week. I did find the non-toxic recipe (no Borax!) and the kids love it. I think they enjoy creating it almost as much as they like playing with it. They feel like chemists. Not sure how I feel about that… I do know that it means I need to stock up on cheap glue.

Binders

We use new binders for each school year. In my state, we don’t really have to keep yearly records like this, but I do just to have them. Big binders keep it all neat and organized. Plus the kids like making pictures and sliding them into the front clear cover. I also use binders for myself in my office for different projects I’m working on.

What Else?

The only thing we use on a daily basis other than pencils, notebooks, and binders is our curriculum. I started out going overboard but quickly realized our day goes much better if we keep things simple.

I’m all about keeping it simple.

I will do a review of the curriculum we’ve been using for the last 2 years in a different post, but we do use a laptop for most of it. Nothing fancy, because with pre-teens, that keyboard isn’t going to be sticky-free for long. I got a Chromebook that gets the job done, but doesn’t offer a ton of extras so no one is excited about playing on the computer after school is done.

How about you?