Simple Homeschool Supply List for the Little Years
If you are new to homeschooling, don’t fret over the supply list. Find peace that most of the items you need are already in your home! Jump to the bottom of this post to read to Simple Homeschool Supply List!
Beat the Overwhelm and create a Simple Homeschool Supply List
If you’re going to run a school in your home, being streamlined is a must. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to buy if you’re just starting. Soon into my homeschooling journey, I learned that you don’t need copious amounts of items to provide a rich environment for a child’s education. In fact, I have found having too many items make it harder to focus on what your child needs and may disrupt the opportunity of learning in your home. I hope you find peace in the fact that the things we use the most are common household items you may already have!
I promise you, more is not better. Your kids will thrive with quality and simple items. They DO NOT need all the flashy, educational fads that claim to help facilitate learning. If you’re feeling stressed, they likely are too! Curating a simple space with the right homeschool supplies is a great way to ensure that you can focus your time on what matters and not waste too much time finagling useless items.
Check your Mindset and Set Purchasing Boundaries
Before you start creating your simple homeschool supply list, set a budget and boundaries. Before purchasing items, ask yourself why you are purchasing them. Check out my article 7 Ways to Save Money as a Mom for tips on how to evaluate your spending habits.
If this is your first year homeschooling, I encourage you to take a deep breath and find peace in the fact that you are capable of providing a great education to your child within your home. Understand that your back-to-school supplies list WILL be different than a student going to public school. It is SO tempting to buy every item that is labeled as “educational”. Tons of amazing products may help teach your kids but you will never have them all, trust me, you can have too much curriculum. Homeschooling does not need to come at an extra cost. Especially during the little years, you can provide an incredibly rich education with pencils, crayons, paper, outdoors, and a local library card.
Take it easy on yourself and stick to a simple homeschool supply list of tried and true items. If special items pop up throughout the year that you want, keep a list in your phone notes that you can reference when you have extra money in your budget. I keep a list and will usually buy a few items off of it for birthdays and Christmas. Board games often fall into a giftable purchase because they are fun and provide educational value that kids can learn at a rapid pace. I encourage you to approach your school year with a ” less is more” mindset.
Create your Homeschool Space
This is not the blog post for Pinterest-worthy homeschool room! I am a very regular mom working with what she has to create an atmosphere of learning in her very lived-in home. We do not have a homeschool room, and when it comes to what you may envision as “school time” most of our school work is done at the kitchen table. Most of our read aloud time is done on the living room couch.
We have a cube shelf in the corner of the kitchen that I have designated for all of our homeschool supplies. The shelf is pretty rickety and has been repaired many times, but it gets the job done. Don’t be tempted to run out and buy a new supply cabinet or pretty IKEA organizer. Use what you have! If you have a younger child who is learning to read and count, a simple basket full of wooden letters on a filled bookshelf is more than enough fill their educational needs.
A great way to make sure you are using your items is to store them in an accessible way. Not all of us have a supply cabinet that we can pack to the brim with craft supplies and color-coded by academic subjects. I find that when I do put things away in closets, I forget I have them which causes me to buy more or not use them at all.
Keeping our weekly supplies where we use them, makes it easy for my boys to grab their work and clean up when they’re done. The best part is that my daily lessons are much more streamlined when all of my supplies are in arms reach and the “educational” items I do purchase get a lot of use. When I review my lesson plans at the beginning of each week, I quickly grab any items I know I will need and put them in the weekly bin that I can pull out each morning.
Simple Homeschool Supply List for the Younger Years
The great thing about most of these items is they are multipurpose. That means they can be used for different subjects, many times, for many years! I try not to buy many subject-specific items that can only be used for one teaching subject.
I have categorized this list into a few different categories. This list is not a complete minimalist approach, but I can assure you everything on this list is used OFTEN and will add great value to your homeschool life and school year.
After three years of homeschooling, these are the items I have found most useful. I have put an *asterisk* on the items that I believe are non-negotiable and provide the best multipurpose value. If you want to keep your supplies extremely minimal, purchase the asterisk items at a bare minimum.
Free Supplies:
- Library Card*
- Conversations with community members*
- Grocery store trips*
- Read-aloud books from your home*
- Manipulatives ( acorns, rocks, beans, rice, cereal, legos, etc.)*
- Walks outside*
Office Supplies
- Pencils*
- Paper*
- Stapler
- Resturaunt Menues
- Paper protectors
- Larger three-ring binder
- Clip Boards
- Sand Timers
- Electric Pencil Sharpener
- White Board
- Dry Erase Markers
- 3 hole Punch
- Index cards
- Page markers ( big paper clips)
Art Supplies
- Markers*
- Crayons*
- Colored Pencils*
- Paintbrushes*
- Notebooks*
- Scissors*
- Kwik Stix
- Art Caddy
- Tempera Paint
- Glue sticks
- Construction Paper
- Water colors Pallete
- Water Color Tubes
- Water Color Paper
Language Arts
- Lined paper*
- Easy Readers * ( Can get these from library, I like the Good and Beautiful sets)
- Wooden letters
Math
Side note on Math Manipulatives: Chances are you already have several things in your home that can be used for manipulatives. I don’t think counting beads or bears are a necessary purchase. Having another container of small plastic pieces stresses me out.
Nature Study
- Nothing, go outside and talk, play, and wonder with your child. Paint or draw pictures of what you see with supplies you already have for other subjects.
Geography/History
- Globe
- Map ( we have one on the wall, but I think a shower curtain map would be awesome!)
- Timeline- there are many ideas online about how to create a timeline. We have one made out of card stock with three centuries on each landscape-oriented page taped to an open wall in our home. Each page is taped together at the seam to form an accordion-like timeline that can be put away in a binder when we want to store it.
Larger Investments
I see many people include a binding machine in their homeschool list. I do not think this is necessary, I choose to pay our local office store to bind the few items I may need throughout the year. It is not worth storing in my opinion.
Card and Board Games
What will you include in your Simple Homeschool Supply List?
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