Teachers’ Holiday Shopping Lists

As the holidays approach, many of us are making up shopping lists. Maybe you’re someone who will just wing it. When you see the perfect gift for someone, you’ll know it. How long is your list of people you’ll be gifting this holiday season? For some people, the list can be as long as your arm! There is one particular group, though, that often has an even longer list over the holidays: teachers.

While you’re out shopping for the perfect gifts, you may wonder why the parking lot of the office supply store is so full. Surely there can’t be that many people with paperclips on their wish lists. The phenomenon you’re seeing is teachers buying supplies themselves. Holiday sales are a great way to find savings on common classroom supplies. Teachers might even be doing their shopping online, using sites like https://www.leeleelabels.com/ to order fresh custom labels for desks and other web-based sources for specialty items. But why do teachers do this? The simple response is that, for many of them, they have to.

Depending on the state and, sometimes, the specific school district within the state, classroom supplies can be in short supply. Often, teachers get just one chance to order supplies for the whole year, estimating what they need. If they estimate wrong, that supply is gone for the year. In other situations, the supplies they want for the best activities to help their students learn aren’t deemed “necessary” by school administrators and are never ordered in the first place.

Thankfully, not all of the teachers you see shopping are spending their own money when they’re buying their own supplies. The holidays put many people in a giving mood. If they’re lucky, teachers receive gift cards or other forms of monetary support for their classrooms. Holiday and post-holiday sales are a great time to get the most out of the donated money, so they’re off to stock up!

Whether paying out of pocket themselves or finding other sources of funding, teachers are diligently out there buying much-needed supplies for their classrooms. What they buy depends largely on the age group and the subjects they teach. An elementary school art teacher is much more likely to stock up on glitter than a high school math teacher (but we won’t judge if that teacher decides that math could use a little more sparkle).

Of course, there are the basics that you’d expect to find in any classroom: pencils and paper. Paper gets used up quickly, and pencils have an astounding ability to disappear at a nearly unimaginable rate. Some students bring these supplies from home, but they tend to be forgetful, and teachers want to make sure everyone has a way to write in class.

Those who teach younger children often need to stock up on more colorful supplies. In an elementary school teacher’s cart, you’re likely to find crayons, colored pencils, markers, paints, construction paper, and the like. You also might find them picking up glue, glitter, and scissors. Scissors don’t seem like a consumable product, but those little hands can be rough on them!

Bearing all this in mind, you may want to consider being one of those who donate to a classroom this holiday season. Your child’s teacher already has one hundred and fifty-two mugs at home. Perhaps this year’s teacher’s Christmas gift could be an office supply gift card instead.