Homeschool Tutorial School Supplies

I teach language arts classes at a homeschool tutorial to middle and high school students. As part of that in addition to the novels we will study, I give them a supply list for my class. I ask that they have a 3 ring binder with tabbed sections labeled: reading, writing, grammar, and graded papers. Each time I give them a handout in class I tell them what tab to file them behind so that they can easily find it at a later date when I want to refer back to their notes. I have them keep their papers I’ve graded behind that tab so that when we learn new writing skills we can go back and use their previous writing to revise and practice the new technique. I want to focus more on revision because that’s one of the things we don’t often have time to do since we only meet once a week.

One thing about me is that I love color. I go everywhere with my felt tip pens and take notes in multiple colors. I always ask my students to have colored pens in class each day which we can use to annotate books, edit papers, and color code different topics. In addition, I ask them to have 5 different colors of highlighters. This is because I have them highlight certain themes in the books we read certain colors, particular elements of their writing in assigned colors, and other things in class and for homework.

The newest supply I’ve added is sticky tabs and 2 sizes of sticky notes. I encourage them to use the sticky tabs to mark powerful quotes or things they want to discuss in their novels. We’ve found lots of uses for the sticky notes. These also can be used to annotate things in their novels, but we’ve found fun things to do with them in class. Let’s face it, no matter what age you are there’s something fun about using sticky notes! I have honestly been so surprised by the immediate by-in I seem to get when I ask them to do things with their sticky notes.

Here are a few ways we’ve used them recently in class:

1. I put a KWL chart on the board, and they write something they know, want to know, and afterwards, learned and stick them up on the board. Then we go over everyone’s together.

2. After we learned different types of story openers and closers they wrote stories with them at home, and I had them read someone else’s paper and use their small sticky note to guess what type of opener or closer they used.

3. I start class with an icebreaker question relating to our novel in some way, and have them write their answer to the question and post it on the board.

4. After teaching them a new writing technique or literary devise, I give them a funny way to practice it and they write an example on a sticky note and stick it on the board.

5. We do graffiti walls over themes of novels, and they write their thoughts on sticky notes and stick to the graffiti walls.

6. When editing one another’s papers, we use different color sticky notes for things we liked and things they need to work on.

7. I ask them to write character, setting, or item suggestions on different sticky notes then their classmates draw one to write a story about. We call this ‘story soup’.