It’s a labor of love.

Our bento lunchboxes by PlanetBox are still like-new and are nearly 10-years old. No kidding! We have purchased new “carry bags” on occasion but only due to cosmetic/design preference as the kids transitioned to upper-level grades. I guess unicorns aren’t as cool when you’re in middle school.

I’ve had a Kenneth Cole Reaction commuter pack that’s going on 10 years. Splurge on a quality laptop backpack with plenty of organization features! It’s super helpful for road-schooling because it serves as your new ‘classroom’ and will hold books, maybe a binder, school supplies, snacks, electronics etc.

This is my daily open-and-GO binder and holds nearly every product that follows in this top-ten list. It stores my pencil pouch, 4-5 weeks of work for each student, DPI forms, library cards, and extra paper. When I throw this binder in my pack I know I have what I need for a successful road schooling day. Everything else I can get at the library!

A must-have! Each student’s working binder has a supply pouch loaded with pencils and erasers at minimum. When we’re on top of it they might have some extra markers or colored pencils and some scissors. My pouch stores highlighters, sticky notes and…hair ties.

Who else loves these pens!? I’ve been known to hide the box because everyone in the house swipes them! I usually stock up on blue, black and one pack of multi-color. If you have a bigger family you might want to splurge on the 36-pack.

I realized very quickly why teachers like this brand of pencils! These high-quality pencils write consistently and are great for using in pencil sharpeners. I started with cheap pencils at first but quickly switched to these when we were breaking lead and grinding pencils in the sharpener.

Tried the pencil-top erasers and they always get lost or only half used. Nope. Tried some loose novelty erasers in funky shapes to make school more ‘fun’. Didn’t work, waste of money. Stumbled across these one day and threw them in the cart as an impulse-buy and we’ll keep on buying! They work great.

I stock up on sticky notes and tabs at the beginning of the year. They are used for bookmarks, brainstorming, feedback, love notes, outlining creative writing assignments, chore checklist and so much more. I feel lost when I run out. :)

There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not highlighting something. Whether it’s assignment instructions in my student’s working binder, breaking down sentence structure or highlighting notes in my own instructor’s guide having a variety of colors available is a nice-to-have.

We started out with cheap spiral notebooks but it just didn’t work for us. Because our curriculum comes binder-ready (example) it just made more sense for us to tuck loose-leaf paper in the back of our binders. I wasn’t sad to say goodbye to fighting the spiral. It’s so much nicer to be able to pull a piece out and snap it back in.

A fun splurge that stays in my backpack. This little gem prints out poloroid-quality prints on 2×3” sticky paper. We’ve used this to stick photo evidence to science experiment lab sheets, build a year-in-review scrapbook folder and just print out fun homeschool moments to stick somewhere. Binder decor?