Third Grade Supply List: Fill & Download for Free

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you’re in third grade. You’ve shown up for school the first day in the pair of shorts you’ve worn all summer and a t-shirt with a big stain down the front. You’re the only one you see who doesn’t have new tennis shoes. You didn’t get a back-to-school haircut, and the only school supplies you brought from home are some old pencils and broken crayons. Your first day of third grade isn’t going to be wonderful, is it?There are several ways this scenario could play out. First, you have to deal with all of this, and the picture you color is limited to the five crayons you brought from home. That’s not just embarrassing—it’s humiliating.Or your teacher quietly goes to the bunch of supplies she bought for her students, and she gets out the cheap box of Roseart crayons she got on bulk special. All the other kids have Crayola brand. God bless that teacher for taking care of you, but you still stand out (at least in your mind) because you don’t have Crayolas. You have the cheap charity brand.Another possibility is that when it’s time to color or draw, the teacher passes out a 16-pack of Crayolas to everyone in the class, and she collects them after art time is over. Now there’s no difference between the kid who has an 8-pack of Roseart and the kid who has a 64-box of Crayolas. Everyone is equal. Everyone is using the same colors.I totally get it—you want your kid to have the best. You don’t want the things you bought for your child to be used by some other kid whose parents are druggies or unemployed or just plain irresponsible. Life’s not fair, dammit, and kids need to learn that early and often, even on the first day of third grade.But I dare to imagine a world with that final scenario, where there’s no difference in the crayons the kids use for their art projects, where Sally Sue can’t show off every one of the 64 colors she has while Billy Bob struggles to do something with his five broken crayons. Public schools should be a place where everyone is, as much as possible, on the same playing field. That’s why I believe school supplies should be provided by the school system, not the parents.But, but, but TAXES! you scream. How many crayons do you think your school district could buy if it got rid of just one top-level administrator? My vote is for whoever is responsible for professional development, but that’s just one example, and I’m admittedly biased about that based on my experiences as a teacher. I’d rather my tax money go to crayons and other school supplies, so that no third grader has to go through the first day of school as the kid with the broken five-pack of crayons that came with a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

I went back to college when I was about 51…I am 58 now. Some of the professors were awesome, and some, not so much. One in particular was a complete bully. This was art, and so in the first semester I took drawing classes. This professor provided a supply list; I bought everything to the tune of about $300. I had the money. The young folks, not so much. We did not end up using even a third of it. So no wonder when some showed up for class without all the supplies the next semester. Was this professor clueless or what? One time he pointed to a young man’s shoes, in front of the entire class, and asked why he could buy those expensive sneakers and not the supplies? Of course he was dead right about the choice of getting sneakers instead of supplies, but to belittle someone in front of the whole class? Really? He tried it once with me and I was ready. I was fifteen minutes late one day. I walked in and the class was drawing, the professor was n nowhere to be seen, and his computer was blaring music. So I touched ONE button on the computer to turn it down a bit to ask where the professor was. In comes the professor, who heard his music being turned down. OMGosh you would of thought the sky was falling, he berated me right there for touching his computer. I had it…a good friend had just tragically lost her 17 yr old son (my son’s friend since age 3, and I adored him and the family) and he knew I was in mourning. I walked out. It was about 3 days before finals where we put up all of our compositions on the wall, and get critiqued in front of everyone. A bit of a back story; we were assigned to make 9 large compositions and then mat them; he was such a lousy teacher that everyone struggled and he kept reducing the number until it was only three; I had already finished my nine. So, next, I had to meet the head professor for walking out on class and then we would be talking with this drawing professor in his office. I brought my nine finished compositions. I told the head professor about all of the lousy behavior of the drawing professor. He was seldom in class. He was rude, etc.. I insisted I would not participate in the final hallway critique; I would not allow myself to be verbally abused anymore by the professor. So, then in comes mr drawing professor, and he says “THIS is what will happen, yadda yadda”, and I said “NO, this is what will happen..”, and I got my way. He had to privately critique and grade my work and I was to have no further contact with him. And there is so much more to this story, I could write a book. BTW he lost his job about 6 months later. Sad all around.

I went to elementary school in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and, for the first few years, my school supply list was “two pencils, one Big Chief tablet, and a small box of crayons.” Everything else that we needed and/or used was supplied by the school; teachers had budgets to pay for that. When I look at what parents (in the same school district) are asked to buy today — on top of paying “fees” — every fall? That would have been a tough nut for my parents to have cracked, and we weren’t poor.I got to work in the same elementary school as a long-term sub for most of this past school year. Because I floated in and out of “regular” classrooms with my students, I got to observe how things are done today. And I can see that there are many good reasons — other than covering for the “poor” kids — to pool school supplies. Since I worked with 3rd graders, I’ll use them as an example.Everybody moves in and out of different rooms (so sits in different desks) throughout the school day. Students are grouped in different ways based on a number of different factors. All that they keep in their desks are their textbooks, workbooks, and a folder to hold work in progress. Each desk also holds a small whiteboard, a whiteboard marker, and an eraser.Each student carries a binder with a pencil bag in it. There’s a short list of what s/he is responsible for keeping in that bag. When an item goes missing or gets used up, s/he asks his/her homeroom teacher for another one out of the class stash. If a reading class is going to use glue sticks, the glue sticks go into that room.If every student kept his/her own school supplies in his/her desk? First, there’s not enough room. Second, if three different children share the same desk, one of them is going to use another one’s crayons, and break or leave one on the floor. Especially if the second one’s Mom (despite the teacher’s request) sends that huge, awesome box of Crayola when the other two children brought the boring box of 16.Third, whatever a student needs in one room will, inevitably, be in his/her desk in another room. At that age, it’s enough to teach them to check their pencil bags in the morning and make sure that they have three sharp pencils and everything else on that list. It takes most of the year for lots of them to get that.So, it’s mostly a good classroom management plan. It does help cover families that would have a hard time buying all of the supplies, though our community is pretty terrific about donating full backpacks and tossing extras into the collection boxes at our local stores.The other plus? At the end of the school year, the third grade might still have a surplus of perfectly good (and/or unused) white board markers. So, the next fall, parents are asked to buy two whiteboard markers instead of three. Other items fall from the regular school supply list to the “requested / donation” list. Just like, especially for families with several school-aged children, all the little things add up? All the little things that they aren’t asked to buy adds up, too.There are lessons for the students in all of this. We use up what we have before we go get new. Everybody gets what s/he needs, and pretty much the same thing, because school supplies don’t need to be a marker of social status. And, if you’re the kid who is constantly asking to refill his/her pencil bag? Maybe we need to talk about being responsible with your school supplies, and checking around your desk for fallen items before you leave a classroom.