Q for teacher on school shopping
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Anonymous
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Hey teachers! I just did my back to school shopping and I’d love to hear your perspective. I feel like I only ever hear parents complaining about school shopping. I don’t mind purchasing supplies for the classroom at all, but I can’t tell if something is a shared supply or individual.
-do you hate it if parents label supplies? I never know what to label and what not to label. Like a ruler or a composition book. I’m definitely not labeling crayons or anything weird like that. -what do you do when you have too much of something? - how do you come up with these lists? One year it’s a school box wanted and next it’s a vinyl zippered bag. Do you actually care or is that just what the list says? (I know the list is for 4-6 classes per grade, not just your class) - and then of course there’s the super hard to find item every year. This year it’s a 16ct crayon. The thing I’ve never ever found is an 8ct multi cultural crayon. It must be like the holy grail because Walmart/target/amazon only carry 24ct. I’ve seen them on eBay but marked up to 20x their original price. I also needed 8, 8cts of crayons last year. Where do they go? Lol -does it bug you if you say “black composition” but the kid comes with a pink one? Love you all! Keep sharing your Amazon wishlist needs because I love to fill them, especially middle of the year. |
Anonymous
| Not a teacher. I label the top half of items (most expensive half). I don’t label the cheapest half. That sort of does the trick for me. Exception if they said to label folders or notebooks. |
Anonymous
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I remember a mom posting here one year who said she bought the skinny labels and put them on everything, including individual crayons and pencils. I nearly died laughing - she labeled individual crayons!!!
That said, I was pretty pissed one year when my daughter brought in a pink unicorn pencil case labeled with her name on it and the teacher took it and gave it to someone else. My daughter came home BAWLING. She had picked it out herself and offered to pay us $3 of her own money to make up the price difference between that one and the generic blue pencil case. I emailed the teacher and asked her if my daughter could have her pencil case back. To her credit, she took that pencil case back and gave it to my daughter. Since then, I label things my kids want to keep in big block letters front and back with a Sharpie. |
Anonymous
| Why would a teacher give a labeled pencil case to someone else? |
Anonymous
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Honestly, I would just buy the standard crayon box instead of 16. If there are specific colors the teacher wants, she can pull them out.
It drives me crazy that the school lists always ask for the 8 count box of markers, which costs $4 while the 10 count box costs $0.99. I buy the cheap one, I don't know what the difference is other than two extra colors. I also don't buy the Mead Composition books, I buy whatever is cheap - same reason. Why spend $4 when the exact same thing is $0.99 and the kids only use like 20 pages anyway. |
Anonymous
Equity |
Anonymous
Ha I rip out the used 5 pages and send it back the next year. They never ever use those composition books. |
Anonymous
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I reuse stuff from ladt year including the composition books which are rarely used minus like 10 pages so I rip out those pages. Same with spirals and binders and other hardy supplies.
We have an assortment of pens and pencils accumulated over the years from party favors and random giveaways so o dont buy those. Anything else that I can't re-use or is truly needed to be replaced i wait for the tax-free weekend. In VA, the tax free weekend is Aug 1-3 this year. |
Anonymous
| Oriental trading sells the multicultural crayons. |
Anonymous
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Are your kids in elementary? I teach middle school and I rarely get supplies donated. Almost all of the supplies for my room come out of my limited department money or I purchase them myself. Every now and then a parent will send in some tissues or Clorox wipes. I’m grateful for anything I get and rarely have extra, but if I do end up with a surplus I share it with the rest of my team.
In all likelihood the district gave you a generic list of the things they think you should have. The individual teacher probably wasn’t consulted. This drives me crazy, because there is one classroom item I would like my students to have (a particular sized notebook), but it is never on the list, and then parents get annoyed at me because they don’t want to make another trip to the store. So now I just buy the notebooks with my own money and try to get reimbursed. That said, if there is a very specific item listed, it probably means there is some system they are trying to implement across the grade level, so I would try to stick to it. |
Anonymous
| In my daughters’ parochial school, they required parents to label every crayon, marker, pencil, pen! Every year. The thought was, if a crayon fell on the floor, you did not have to say, “Whose crayon is this?” I guess. All of us parents joke that we have become super *masters* of labeling. |
Anonymous
It's a school list and they vary by schools, not a district list. My kids are elementary and I'm excited for middle school when they can have the "nice" supplies and get to choose whatever color folder and notebook they want. My daughters joke that they only ever get to buy boy colors and that pink or purple are never options for anything. A lot of the supplies (antibacterial wipes, tissues, baby wipes, large dry erase markers, soap, bandaids) are definitely for the teacher, so I'm surprised middle school teachers don't ever get any. If you need tissues, hit up the elementary schools. Because my kids are brining in 6 boxes each (6 boxes x 20 kids= 120 boxes. Surely they don't go through a box every other day? Where do they even store these in the classroom? It was a MOUNTAIN of tissue boxes at drop off day), 8 dry erase markers, 100 bandaids, etc. I don't mind buying them though. I remember never having soap in my high school bathrooms, and rarely toilet paper so we all brought them in our backpacks. |
Anonymous
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It drives me crazy that every year the school/teacher asks for like 5 composition books, but every year these books come back home in June with only 10 pages used.
Why bother asking for them if they're barely used? I've stopped buying them and rip out the used pages, but its just extra clutter and wasteful |
Anonymous
I do the same. It's just a game. The worst part is that my family doesn't like using these for extra scrap paper, whereas we don't mind using spiral notebooks instead. Those get used until empty. Those composition notebooks don't lay flat and are frustrating to write in. |
Anonymous
| I hate how they use those compisition books to make fake textbooks. So much time spent cutting and gluing to make sloppy messes. |