Hollister Grade School built in the early 1900'sThe man in front of me in the check-out line was buying school supplies for his little girl. He kept checking the brightly colored school list as he unloaded his cart. A few things that didn't appear to be on his list or in his cart that I remembered taking to school were
1. Oil cloths. In first grade oil cloths were on our list. We each took an 18” square of tablecloth material so that we could roll our clay out without getting our desks dirty. Come clay time our classroom was a colorful quilt of mismatched oilcloths.
2. White paste. We also took crayons, Big Chief tablets, #2 pencils, watercolor paints and white school paste to school. Markers, colored pencils and glue weren’t allowed in first grade, but by third grade the teachers thought we could handle a tube of glue. We quickly proved our maturity by making fake fingernails with it. I think Starla taught us how. We turned our paints over so that we had a long, smooth surface and then spread a thin layer of glue across it. We slid the paints carefully back into our desks and let the glue dry for a day or two. When there were no white spots left we cut it into ten little oblongs to fit over our fingernails. We cut a few terrifically long ones as well as shorter ones. This kept us busy many recesses and sometimes the boys even helped us cut them out, too.
3. Nestle's Quick. Another thing we kept in our desk was a little baby food jar (most of us had baby brothers or sisters) full of Nestle's Quick and a broken plastic spoon. Every afternoon before the last recess we had to drink a carton of milk. Gag. We couldn’t go outside until the teacher shook our carton and said it was empty. I dreaded milk time until someone (again, I think it was Starla) brought some Nestle's Quick and put a couple of spoonfuls in her milk carton and shook it before drinking it. Best grade school fad we had, next to rollerskates at recess.
Did you make glue fingernails or was that a Starla thing?
Did you like the smell of paste as much as I did?
What was your favorite school supply?
8 comments:
Oh, this was a good post. That Nestle Quik thing was pure genius!
We didn't make the fingernails, just used a thin layer of glue to make the glitter stick to our fingernails. 1980's bling at it's finest . . .
My favorite school supply was those pencils that had "cartridge" type lead - when your pencil got dull, you would pull out that cartridge, and push it in at the top of the pencil, making a sharp, new cartridge appear. It was always a great disappointment when you had cycled through them all, and only an already used, dull one appeared.
Oh this was fun to read! I don't think I went to school that long ago but when people come in to Staples asking for stuff on their list, I am really confused on what they mean. I don't know what half of the things are.
My favorite school supply was crayons! I wish it still was a school supply actually...
Oh Heather, glitter! What a brilliant idea. I can now tell I was born a decade too early.
Carolyn, I still remember my first BIG box of crayons. Up until that time the teachers didn't think we could learn our colors correctly if we were confused by colors like magenta and turquoise, so we couldn't have big boxes. But then....but then....one year they let us have the BIG box. I still remember how I felt when my mom brought them home from the store for me. The box had yellow-orange AND orange-yellow in it--lots of choices, lots of choices.
Thanks for visiting me! I loved the smell of paste and the classroom. I think what I liked best was "fresh" brand new crayons or colored pencils. Before the tips wore down ...
Sandy
Wow, I would have loved "milk time." We didn't have to buy any school supplies where I went to school. I would have loved it though because I played "school" all the time with my younger sibling. I would save my papers from school, erase the answers and then re-assign them.
Leave it to Mindy to keep doing MORE school work...I agree with Heather, I LOVED those cartridge pencils, and the more colorful and different yours was, the cooler you were (at least with the girls)! I also liked the smell of glue, and I think we ate it....maybe that's what's wrong with me now!
I loved rubber cement because you could play with it over and over again. I also had yucky glue paste that had a wide stick attached to the lid, it was more work to even get it out of the bottle.
I love this! So many things I had forgotten about, like the white paste. How could I forget that? We made glue fingernails, too. My favorite thing was the big box of crayons with pointy new tips and so many glorious colors.
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