Favorite Back to School Products for Elementary School Students By Karina and Janessa

We use pencils in school for everything, like homework, filling out forms, and doing math problems in class. Mechanical pencils are much better than regular pencils because we never have to use a pencil sharpener. We buy the simple Papermate and Bic mechanical pencils all the time. If you use regular pencils, then you should get an electronic pencil sharpener for home. The ones that use batteries or hand power aren't always strong enough and they can't sharpen the fancy pencils have coating. Because we use pencils a lot for school, having a good eraser is very important. The eraser stubs on pencils are too short and small. They don't work well for erasing lots of stuff and they also run out too fast. Erasers with neat designs don't always work well either. We buy the simple Pink Pearl erasers because they're big enough and erase everything really easily. We like the Crayola colored pencils best because they don't break as often as other brands. The pack of 12 pencils is great for school and we keep them in our backpack. We use them for a lot of our art projects, like our Meet the Masters art program where we learn about different artists and their techniques. We use the colored pencils to practice shading and other art techniques. We use Elmer's glue sticks all the time for school arts and crafts projections. We always have some at home and buy more every year. They're better than liquid glue because they're not as messy. The glue doesn't get on your hands and all over the desk. Liquid glue also gets clogged and you can't use it anymore. The caps on glue sticks keep the glue wet and the glue stick never clogs. They also come in colors and that's helpful for seeing where you're gluing (the glue dries clear). An electronic dictionary is very helpful for checking spelling and learning definitions of words. We like how they're really small and can fit in a pocket. They're useful for editing our class reports and making sure our grammar is always correct. If we're not sure how to spell something, we type how we spelled it into the electronic dictionary. If we spelled it wrong, the dictionary shows us how to correctly spell it. Using an electronic one is much faster and easier compared to using a paper dictionary, especially when you have to look up definitions for a lot of words. The big paper dictionary is also made for grown-ups and the definitions are sometimes hard to understand. Everyone we know has Word at home for doing homework. When we write a report, we write a rough draft by hand in class. Then we edit it ourselves. Then we go home, type it in Word, and print it for our teacher. We have Word on the computers at the library and school computer lab, but it's way easier to write reports at home. One teacher said that there was a student that didn't have Word at home, so he had to email his report from school to his friend, and then go to his friend's house to finish and print the report. We like using Word because it's really easy - most of the functions are understandable by kids. Like if we're doing a report on a particular subject, we can include fonts and clip-art which fit the theme. For 4th grade and below, any simple calculator with numbers and 4 operations is good. For 5th grade and later, you need higher functionality like square root and pi. We're learning how to calculate area, volume, more difficult long division, and basic pre-algebra. A good calculator is very helpful for checking homework and learning new math concepts. We got a TI-34 advanced calculator so we wouldn't have to buy a new calculator later.