Seventeen children arrived in my classroom yesterday morning, most of them with their supplies. One of our first activities every year is to sort our supplies. If you've never spent time in an elementary school classroom on the first day you are missing the sheer joy of small children weighed down by an increasing amount of school supplies.
At our school we create a supply lists by grade level. So, as a first grade team we agree on a list. As a result, I immediately pass on the pencils to others because we use pens. I also get rid of the erasers because they will do us no good. We also aren't likely to use so many binders or folders. It feels wasteful to have families buy all this but we don't know who is in each class until the week before school starts.
At the end of last year I did send each child home with a pair of scissors, packages of markers and crayons, and some glue sticks - all left from our year's supply. I hope they were used frequently!
2 comments:
We had a church sponsor our entire school and provided bookbags full of supplies last year and this year and I also had a ton of stuff left over after last year!
Jenny, I'm intrigued by your pen-only classroom. I'd love to hear more about that. I imagine you're probably doing Lucy Calkins for writing, whose emphasis on pens vs. pencils is familiar to me, but I don't think I've seen a teacher eliminate pencils all together. Fill me in--why is that your approach? I'm a student teacher, and you with your great blog are one of my many mentoring teachers!
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