Our homeschooling “must haves”

We all love new school supplies at the beginning of the school year.

Some of my favorite “must have” supplies are:

  Sticky Notes

I {love} sticky notes and pretty notepads.  I leave notes for myself and the kids everywhere.  Sticky notes torn into thirds mark pages needing to be corrected or mark pages to be read.

 

 A Planner

I’ve talked before of how I {heart} binders and normally I just use a binder for our school planner.  This year, I bought The Well Planned Day planner.  I really like it.  It’s easy to use…and it’s pretty.  That makes me smile.

 

 Blank lesson plan forms

For many years, I’ve used a blank lesson plan form for the kids’ weekly assignment checklists that I’ve printed from Donna Young.  This year I’ve started using a lesson planner that I got from Mama Jenn’s blog. 

 Index cards

{especially the colored ones} We use index cards for many things…vocabulary, memory work, math facts, games…

 

 Paper Clips

I do use regular silver paper clips.  But sometimes I like a little pizzazz.   Some of my paper clips are the small colored paper clips.  And some are these larger clips.  The pretty one came from a craft store’s dollar spot. 

 

 Spiral Bound Notebooks

Right up there with my love of binders is my love for spiral bound notebooks.   They hold my to-do lists, my thoughts, shopping lists, price lists, budgets, the kids’ grades…and we can’t forget the kids’ work! 

 

  Color

I love color!  Lots and lots of color!  Colorful highlighters, colorful dry erase markers, color, color, color.  And a few black ones too because sometimes I need to be understated.

 Number Cubes

These are used daily around our house.  They are great for playing games, adding numbers, multiplying numbers, counting games, and on & on. 

 A good manual pencil sharpener

We are tough on pencil sharpeners.  We’ve broken electric ones and manual ones.  We aren’t picky!  I have found that a manual sharpener stands up to us a little better than an electric one though.  PS.  Check out this blog post where I posted our sharpener from the past…see what I mean about how tough we are on sharpeners? 

What are some of your “must haves” for your homeschool or your home?

I’d love to hear!