Back to school time! What is the weirdest item on your kid's school supply list?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Every year, when my sister’s kids were smaller, I would call her up in August and ask this question. One year, she reported that she’d been asked to supply videotapes/cassettes/CDs pretty much every year in elementary school. Yet, the teachers never ever sent anything home on them. We figured the teachers were making their own private home movies and getting their students’ parents to subsidize it.

My workplace is holding a school supply drive, which we will donate to whichever school we’ve decided to adopt. So there’s a supply list in the break room, to which we are all expected to contribute. I think the biggest headscratcher is for 4th grade, “small deoderant.” :dubious:

None of the other grade levels requested deoderant. Apparently, 4th graders are stinkier than 5th graders. Or something. Several of the grades requested “head sets” and I can only take that to mean you are supposed to supply headphones. Do they mean earbuds or $40 noise cancelling headphones?

The lists are simultaneously overly specific and terribly vague. It’s weird. One grade wants 4-pack #2 pencils. Another grade wants only 2-pack #2 pencils. Every classroom wants facial tissues and hand sanitizer. The Kindergarten teacher requested “instant hand sanitizer soap,” “wipes,” “liquid anti-soap” whatever the hell that is, and “hand sanitizer.” Evidently, kindergarteners are filthy little buggers. Same grade-level teacher also wants two different sizes of Zip loc baggies (1 quart and 1 gallon). What they hell are they going to do with those? Send the children’s body parts home in them? :confused:

So what strange or questionable items have appeared on your kid’s school supply list? Do you question this? Do you just suck it up and send it in?

2

Well, thanks for the thread, it got me to go look at what I’m supposed to send this year. There’s nothing very odd on it, but I do wonder about all the antibacterial gel and Kleenex.* As far as I know, the child never uses it.
Let’s see…last year we were supposed to send one bottle of water. Then the kids were meant to rinse and re-use it all year. Don’t they have water fountains anymore?
I’ve decided not to go out and buy a bunch of stuff this year. I always buy the whole list and then things don’t actually get used, or the teacher wants a binder like the list says, only bigger… I’m likely going to be forced to go to WalMart at midnight the day before he needs something, but at least I won’t have a bunch of brand new colored pencils sitting around for nothing!

Hey, what are the quart bags for?!

*I’ve never understood why my workplace is willing to provide us with Kleenex when the bathrooms are full of toilet paper. (And you should hear the outcry from my co-workers when the Kleenex runs out!) I, for one, don’t have such a problem with my bodily fluids escaping that my employer needs to worry about it. Unless you count the monthly problem, but I doubt they’re willing to supply me with free tampons.

3

Dung Beetle: This is a Florida school, as well, but I’ll be hanged if I can figure out why Kindergarteners need quart- and gallon-sized zip loc baggies. Something to send the pants home if they pee in them? I don’t have a clue. And would that be one box of each size or one baggie? See what I mean about specific and vague at the same time?

4

That would be my guess. Or clothing/personal belongings that have gotten dirty from outside or from art projects. Plus something to take leftover food, arts/crafts projects, and food projects home in.

5

There’s a lot of things I can imagine a teacher getting use of them from, like to hold supplies and such. Maybe they aren’t for the individual student to use, but the classroom as a whole? Kind of like with kleenex.

6

Yes, the zip lock baggies are for cutsey art projects. That way you don’t get glitter all over the inside of your backpack.

7

The headphones are probably for the computer lab. I bought the cheapest ass Walmart specials I could find. My daughter told me she used them twice.

Strangest request: tennis balls. Not for PE, for cutting and putting over the feet of the desks so they were easier and quieter to move. You used to see them used that way on walkers for old people. Maybe that’s where the idea came from.

8

I’m pretty sure that’s right. My wife is a first grade teacher, and kleenex is on the list for her kids. They go into the classroom’s general supply cupboard, and believe me she goes through them.

9

Dung Beetle, you expect me to run to the bathroom every time I need to sneeze?

10

The strangest thing one of my kids had to supply last year was one clean sock. As far as we know, nothing was done with them.

For fifteen years or so I’ve been sending in those full boxes of gallon and quart bags.

Kindergarten sounds wild this year. The teacher needs 20 glue sticks and 4 boxes of 24 Crayola crayons from each student.

11

Or do like my team did last year when 3 of us had Colds From Hell at the same time and keep a roll on the desk.

12

Huh? You mean you don’t use your colored pencils? I don’t know how many sets of them I’ve gone through in my lifetime, but I still draw quite a bit.

As for the Kleenex, our teachers always kept one open box on their desks, and all the kids were expected to take one as needed.

13

They sure are. They will happily pick their noses and then grab your hand. Half the sanitizer is probably for the teachers, though you’d think after a couple of years they’d never get sick again, having already had every germ known to mankind.

14

Zip locks are also for the zillions of flash cards and the mini readers that start coming home as early as kindergarten.

15

This year was the first year my daughter’s list didn’t call for hand sanitizer. She thought that was strange at first, but then decided that the teachers figure 5th graders are old enough now to not snort and snot all over their hands (all the other grades still had to pony up a bottle). We did have to buy 3 boxes of kleenex and a box of trash bags, though.

16

That would be a bottle of mud then, right?

17

The small deodorants are possibly for the personal growth/hygience annual lesson. We do it in 5th grade here - the boys get a bag with a mini deodorant and the girls get a bag with a pad in it.

Socks make great erasers for the small, individual-size whiteboards. Lots of teachers have a class set and the kids use them in math.

18

My daughter’s school district reorganized a few years ago, and put all the 4th and 5th graders into one school. When she went to that school, the number of colds she got per winter went dramatically down.

19

I teach second grade, and I run out of ziploc baggies every year. Some of the ways we use them:
-Making snacks with 100 items in them
-Making flash cards for a student’s individually thorny addition problems;
-Containing phonics work cards
-Sending home books from the classroom library (the baggies keep them from getting crumpled in backpacks)
-Science projects
-Containing individual sets of math manipulatives (e.g., for practicing two-digit addition with base-ten blocks, each kid needs 19 ones blocks, 19 tens blocks, and 1 hundreds block; it’s much easier to create these sets once and then keep them in plastic bags than to create them anew for each lesson)
-Saving pieces of paper for a collage or other project if the lesson needs to be stopped for the day
-When a kid inexplicably loses their crayon box, containing their crayons

They’re very useful.

Kleenex: if I let students go to the bathroom every time they needed to blow their nose, some of the kids would spend half the time out of the classroom. Also, I can’t supervise the students when they’re in the bathroom, and without supervision, trust me, some of them will get up to all sorts of shenanigans (mooning one another, fighting, creating a skating rink on the bathroom floor by flooding it and then sliding back and forth, gossiping horribly about one another, climbing the stall walls, etc.). It’s actually worse than that: on the few occasions where I’ve tried to limit tissue access to times when I’m not actively teaching (i.e., students can get tissue when they’re doing group work or seat work or the like), I end up with miserable kids with snot running down their face. Kids need tissue a lot, and they need it right away.

Water bottle: very similar. Some kids discover that the water fountain is a great work-avoidance technique, and will spend half their time back at the fountain if they can. If they have a bottle of water on their desk, they can take a drink and stay working: no excuse for wandering around doing nothing.

Hand sanitizer: the more I can get them to disinfect their hands, the better. They’re little adorable germ factories.

Deodorant: this one’s a little weird, but I know our school counselor kept a supply on hand, for the kids who were starting to enter puberty early and whose parents weren’t on the ball enough to supply the kids. I even had one second-grader very proud of his own stick of deodorant: he didn’t need it, but it gave him great confidence to get it.

Glue sticks: 24 glue sticks is a heckuva lot per kid, almost one stick per two weeks. However, consider two things. First, there may be a lot of kids whose parents won’t buy any, and the responsible parents may be subsidizing them (if they don’t, their teacher probably will end up buying supplies out of pocket). Second, kids can be remarkably clueless about leaving the caps off glue sticks. I eventually starting bemoaning the death of glue sticks and arranging their caps like little gravestones to impress on students how tragic it was when they weren’t responsible with the supplies. I think it helped a bit, but I’d still pretty regularly find the caps on the floor.

20

Question: what do you do when you can’t afford to buy all this stuff on the list? Someone on another MS just posted their supply list and it was a good $100 per kid, even on sale–and she has 2 at the school. Plus she said “$100 in school fees.” I don’t know what that was for. So what do you do if you haven’t got that kind of money? I sure don’t.