Spend a little extra on school supplies.
Kids are tough on their supplies. You may be tempted to buy the $1 pack of pencils at Target, but those pencils suck! The lead is hard, which makes erasing difficult. Made all the more difficult by the cruddy eraser that is atop the rubber-like pencil. Spend the extra buck and invest in a LARGE pack of good pencils. My favorite, black Ticonderoga pencils with a black eraser. The lead is softer and erases easily.
Kids are tough on their supplies. You may be tempted to buy the $1 pack of pencils at Target, but those pencils suck! The lead is hard, which makes erasing difficult. Made all the more difficult by the cruddy eraser that is atop the rubber-like pencil. Spend the extra buck and invest in a LARGE pack of good pencils. My favorite, black Ticonderoga pencils with a black eraser. The lead is softer and erases easily.
Also, white block
erasers are great, especially if your child has hand writing difficulties and needs to erase a lot.
Binders break!
If your child struggles with organization
(attention all you parents of middle school boys), a bent three ring binder
will be the death of your child! Once it is bent, you can never align the rings
again and your child’s backpack will become a sea of ripped papers. If it bends, buy another one! Fast! Here is one I like.
Embrace the Paper Jam!
Not the paper jam one experiences at the Xerox machine, but
this is a breed of middle schooler that hates to organize his papers
accordingly in his binder. He just shoves the papers into the binder
haphazardly paying no attention to subject. The Paper Jammer hates opening and
closing his binder and will just rip out the notebook paper or worksheet making
it nearly impossible to put back in to the binder appropriately. I have battled
the Paper Jammer for years. I have occasionally won a battle, but I felt I was losing
the war. So, I have learned to embrace the Paper Jammer. If your kid is gonna
just shove stuff in his binder, versus file papers, then give him a place to
‘jam” it. For my students with organizational issues, I put colored dividers
with pockets in his binder. In sharpie, I write the subject name on the tab and
let him jam away! I encourage parents to make the child (with adult guidance) to sit down at least once a week and truly organize the binder. Get a set of reinforcers and a hole punch for home, too.
Be prepared to buy more supplies as the year goes on.
