Planners & Pencils

Have you heard of The Homeschool Student Planner? I've had my eye on them but wasn't sure I wanted to buy them since I'd be needing 4 of them. At $20 each for something I wasn't even sure was worth it, meaning couldn't I just print something off or make my own a lot cheaper? They are $15 if you get b&w.

Well a few days ago I joined a yahoo group of the person who created them and today she posted about a sale for some of them that were slightly imperfect (extra ink dots or color faded in spots etc) but perfectly usable. $10. So I took her up on that. I get one (in color) to test out and it cost me half the price. I'll let you know what I decide about it.

What do you do about pencils in your homeschool? We have gone through 3 electric pencil sharpeners and countless plastic handheld ones. The pencils all seem to break easily or the lead falls right out. Does that happen to you? I thought they were cheap pencils but this happened with many brands. Very annoying and very hard to be productive that way. I decided to go with mechanical- I thought I was brilliant when that lightbulb went off! Only to find out Monkey Man and Baby Girl just love to steal the erasers and what's a mechanical pencil without it's eraser? Then the lead falls out. I tried a pencil eraser, doesn't work. You can't push the end to get the lead to come out. I had a hard time finding refill erasers and I was buying new pencils all to often just to get erasers that might last 3 days tops before little hands found them. I started giving stickers to anyone who turned in their pencil, in tact, at the end of school and then put it in a safe place. (We have a sticker chart that when you get 60 for good deeds etc you pick something out of the box.) Still it's not the best system, so much for being brilliant ;)

I'm not sure I found a solution yet, but I did find a great deal (I think). I got a box of (12) pencils for $1.41. Lead refills for $0.59 and erasers (6 per tube) for $0.08!! So I ordered 12 boxes of pencils (144), 36 packs of lead refills (12 sticks per pack =432), and 100 erasers (600!).

Also got free shipping. I heart free shipping.

I hope that lasts a long time, children will not have access to my stash and they will only get one at a time and will be instructed to guard them with their life. Well maybe it won't be that drastic. We'll see ;)

Shoplet is where I found them. If you use that link you will get 10% off your first order. I couldn't pass up 600 erasers for $8. I received everything today. I will say their packing had a lot to be desired though. Everything was rolling around in the box. They must have never heard of packing peanuts or those plastic bubbles or anything! Still everything I ordered was there and in one piece. Minus 2 single erasers- 2 of my tubes only had 5 erasers instead of 6. So I guess I got 598 erasers.