7 Tips for Taking Care of School Supplies

Taking care of school supplies and textbooks will make them last longer so that your child can use them throughout the year. Learn more!

Pencils, pencil sharpeners, and crayons, among others, are items that tend to get lost easily when your child goes to school. And over time, notebooks, books, and pads of paper deteriorate if they’re not treated with care. In this article, we’ll give you some tips on how to take care of school supplies.

Teaching your children the value of their school supplies and the importance of maintaining them to ensure their durability will make them tidier and more responsible. Keep reading to find out how to keep school supplies in good condition.

Tips to take care of school supplies

There are materials that have greater durability than others. For example, it’s normal for pencils, markers, and crayons to need to be replenished or replaced several times during the year. However, most supplies can last the entire school year, as long as children learn to take care of them and maintain them properly. Here are some tips on how to take care of school supplies.

1. Cover textbooks at the beginning of the school year

Remember that your child will spend the whole year with the same school supplies, so it’s best to wrap books with paper for better durability. In this case, you can use contact paper, which is an adhesive used as a cover and lining that will protect notebooks, books, dictionaries, or folders.

Also, so that the materials don’t get lost or confused with those of other children, you can identify them with your child’s first and last name and the name of the grade or teacher. Do this with each of the supplies that your child will use in class.

Keeping the supplies in different cases and arranging the items in different compartments of the backpack will help to achieve better organization, more care, and avoid the loss of objects.

2. Keep the supplies in cases

A strategy for taking care of the school supplies will be to keep them and classify them in several cases. Pencils, crayons, erasers, and pencil sharpeners are the items that are most likely to get lost. Therefore, we recommend using a particular case to store these items.

A second case will be very useful for storing tracing and craft materials, such as erasers, scissors, glue, and correctors. As for rulers or geometric sets, they should be placed in a hardcover pencil case to prevent them from breaking. If you keep the materials sorted, the child’s backpack will be tidier and they’ll be able to find the objects more easily. Instruct them that after using each item, they should return it to its place to maintain order.

3. Only bring the materials needed for each day

It’s common for teachers to specify certain articles for certain subjects according to the class schedule. Make sure that the child’s backpack contains only the material that they’ll need to use that day. This way, the items will be neater, the backpack will be less heavy, and there’ll be less chance of losing materials.

4. Organize notes in folders

It’s very important for children to carry a folder where they can keep photocopies or loose notes given to them by their teachers, such as notices to parents. In general, loose sheets end up cluttering their backpack.

5. Keep the backpack and textbooks clean

Don’t allow your child to have notebooks with scratches, marks, stickers, or drawings. Instead, teach them to keep them clean, in good condition, and to treat them with care. A notebook with scratches gives a disorderly and unclean impression. In the same way, instruct your child to wipe their backpack with a damp cloth from time to time.

In addition, the backpack should have different compartments so that your child has everything in its place. For example, food and drinks should go in a lunch bag so they don’t get mixed up with school supplies.

6. Taking care of library books

When books are checked out from the library to take home, they should be returned in the same condition within a specific period of time. This teaches children to take care of items and to be responsible.

7. Have a fixed workspace

If you have a fixed workspace for your child to do homework at home, this will allow him or her to keep materials in one place and keep everything neat and tidy. Also, try to have a compartment or drawer where your child can keep spare materials or those that they don’t need to take to school on a daily basis.

Tidy and well-cared-for materials

This series of tips will allow both parents and young students to be more organized. Taking care of school supplies and textbooks will make them last longer so that the child can use them throughout the school year.