Things You Should Know About School Supplies

You've surely heard of the book All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. My elementary school had a poster between the kindergarten rooms with a bunch of his pearls of wisdom. It may still be hanging there, actually. It looked like this:

I remember dawdling to read it now and then because even at a young age I was good at procrastinating and never being where I was supposed to on time.

Well, allow me to share a few pearls of my own gleaned from actual life experiences.

New colorful pens may not actually help you gain inspiration, but they sure make the doodling while you think a lot more fun. 

Colorful pens do make writing in a lesson plan book or other seemingly tedious tasks a little more fun, too. 

It will always be hard to use the tip on a brand new crayon. Nobody wants to use the crayons with the peeled paper, but ruining that perfect point is the first step to a crayon nubbin. And yet the exhilaration of seeing a box of brand new crayons is too much to overcome. Such a conundrum. 

Markers are preferable to crayons for roughly 90% of all kindergarten illustrations. 
[100% if one of the options is Mr. Sketch Smelly Markers.]

Post-Its are great for writing down To Do lists but also at reminding you to try to limit what you put on there...and who doesn't want to believe they can get everything done each and every day? 

And more recently...

Crayons can come off of clothing even after a long, hot ride in the dryer together -- except orange. If you left an orange crayon in your pocket, yeah, time for a new pair of pants because not even 4 washes with Dawn, OxyClean, and white vinegar will do the trick. But hey, on the upside, if it was yellow you can hold on to a glimmer of hope. 

Laminators that require sticky plastic and a hand crank to use may not do as nice of a job as a laminator with heat and power, but a scarf definitely will retain more integrity if it is caught in the former. 

On a potentially unrelated note, two of my students' finished Thanksgiving place mats went home today with a little extra sparkle.

Can you spot my donation to her artwork?

And this is why we can't have nice kindergarten things. Oh, no, it's not the kids that ruin them...it's the teacher.

Womp womp.