The Tools of the Trade: My School Supplies

There’s something exciting about gathering all your school suppliers at the start of the year. Honestly, sometimes even just walking through the aisles of Officeworks looking at all the various colours of folders and pens just brings me joy. At the start of the year, many of us may try to think of every possible thing we would ever need for the year, purchasing every colour pen and various types of planners. Towards the middle of the year, I always end up having a better idea of what products are actually helpful. At the moment, I could imagine a lot of us only have stuff we actually use in our school bags (plus a bit of scrunched up bits of paper). While having a rainbow of pens isn’t at all essential for school success, having good resources definitely makes school life easier and aids a lot with organisation.

Therefore, I will be showing you the school suppliers which I use and ones that I have decided to stop using throughout the year.

Pens

Sometimes looking at an aisle full of pens is daunting, there is just so many varieties! This year I have experimented with many types of pens, so I consider myself a bit of an expert.

Initially, the pens which I used were erasable pens. I often make mistakes when writing, but I can also sometimes be a bit of a perfectionist. Not a good match. Therefore, I thought this pen would be great for me. However, I didn’t like the fact that I would be running out of ink every single week. It was probably costly, but it was also simply inconvenient. A small factor which I didn’t like was that the ink also wasn’t very dark. I always write in black, so I like the ink looking like black rather than dark grey. With all of these factors in mind, I began purchasing ordinary gel pens.

I love gel-pens. They make my handwriting look nice and the ink is often really dark. Similarly to the erasable pens, the ink in these pens ran out in a flash unfortunately. It was incredibly irritating. It would be reasonable for you to suggest to purchase a pen with a larger ink cartridge, but I think my handwriting looks better when I use smaller, lighter pens.

This led me to return to the old favourite, ball point pens. I stumbled upon these pens:

As advertised, they are quite comfortable to use. The black pen-grip doesn’t add much comfort, but the pens are incredibly lightweight. They are also quite thin. Thus, they are reasonably comfortable to write with. The ink in these pens last a long time, which is something that I really care about. Unfortunately, the ink is not as dark as a gel-pen. These pens are also cost effective, with them being $4.66 for a pack of 10 at Officeworks. I think I’ve found my match with these ones.

I also have some coloured pens, which I use quite a lot when taking notes and studying. I bought them last year. While they are starting to not run as smoothly as they once did, they have and continue to survive for a long time. I know that a lot of people just stick to the traditional blue, black and red pens, but I do find having more colours to be useful. These are the coloured pens I use:

Once I gave up using erasable pens, I knew I would need to get some type of White Out as I’m always making mistakes when writing. Rather than using the typical liquid white-out, I always opt for correction-tape. Despite correction-tape running out more quickly than its counterpart, I find it a lot easier to use and you don’t need to wait for it to dry. I think this opinion is held by a lot of people, I don’t think I’ve seen someone with liquid paper since early secondary school. I get this pack of two from Officeworks for 99c.

                                    

I didn’t use highlighters at all at the beginning of the year. However, I probably use at least one every single day now. When trying to get the key information out of a textbook, I find it much easier to use highlighters than pens to mark the text. Also, it just looks a lot neater than underlining in pen or grey-led pencil.

I suggest having at least two colours, so you can have the ability to recognise what information you will turn into one note and what information you will take down as a separate note. Here is an example from my Legal Studies textbook [Access and Justice VCE Legal Studies Units 1&2] :

As you can see, there are two colours. The text highlighted in orange in the first line was condensed into one note. Meanwhile the information in pink is a separate note. Then the whole process repeats.

I got this multi-pack from Officeworks for $1.98. They do the job well, except my yellow highlighter died very quickly.

Planners

I consider myself a fairly organised person. I like to plan out everything that I do. Therefore, I have two planners. It probably sounds excessive, but let me explain.

Firstly, I have a diary which my school provides every student with. It’s just a plain, weekly planner which also has all the school rules in it (which I doubt anyone reads) and a place to write in your timetable. I use this to put in the due dates of homework, SACs and any other school event happening in the future. I would say this is my main planner despite making use of this one the least out of the pair.

Also, I have a Spirax A4 Cardboard To Do Book.

 Throughout the school day when I figure out what work I need to do at home, I put it in my to-do list. The to-do lists I create are per day, so I may put a task in the next page if I plan on completing it the following day. Having a to-do list as well as a weekly planner helps me figure out what work I need to do now and what work is coming up. I really recommend it, it’s saved myself from being overwhelmed a bunch of times. However, when I run out of pages I do plan on purchasing a different to-do list book. From all the chaos of lugging it in and out of my school bag and being crushed by stacks of books on the way to class, it’s nearly to the point of falling to pieces. It is in pretty awful condition, with the back cover completely ripped off and the front cover looking like it’s been brutally bashed with a hammer. Other than that, I do like the way the book is structured. It provides lots of space.

Post-it Notes

I used to have lined post-it notes, which did come in handy for a while, but I decided not to re-purchase them. Rather, I use sticky tabs as post-it notes. They only have enough space to write a couple of words on them but I think they do the job for me. I also use these as bookmarks for textbooks and as dividers in my binders.

These are the ones I use. The pack has 240 tabs so I can imagine that they will last me into year 12.

Binders

This leads us to the age old debate: exercise books or binders. In year 10, I swore by exercise books. They are lightweight and easy to manage as the pages can’t go flying everywhere. However, I knew that they wouldn’t be suitable for this year. I estimated correctly. Binders are just so much easier, despite being bulky and taking up around triple the amount of space of an exercise book (if not more). You can easily put in handouts rather than needing to trim and glue them in and you can rearrange the order of the pages. Also, you never run out of space! You just fill it up with more paper. I suggest using whatever keeps you the organised the most, but I definitely recommend trying out a binder. If you’re more of an exercise book person, please let me know why that’s your weapon of choice!

Loose-leaf paper and plastic pockets are necessary, complementary items to a binder. While they are mundane, I do really like having some good quality plastic pockets to make my work look acceptable of display. As they are not the most cost effective, I did have to buy the cheap ones when I had to re-purchase some plastic pockets last time. My favourite plastic pockets are J.Burrows A4 60 Micron Sheet Protectors from Officeworks, they just make all my papers look pretty and shiny!

Of course, I have other stationary items, like scissors and a glue stick, but I won’t go into those boring details. The items which I discussed are definitely the most important to me in the terms of enabling me to complete my work to my maximum capability and ensure that I stay organised.

Are there any products which you swear by? Make sure to suggest some in the comments.