Ladies,
One thing to keep in mind as you use the guides is that we specifically choose not to put a supply list in our guides for several reasons. One is that often many of our activities will suggest several variations of an item for you to use. For example, an activity may allow you to use chocolate chips, or raisins, or Oh-shaped cereal pieces. You would not need to have all of these items, as any will do. Or, another activity may mention using a bean bag or a rolled up pair of socks. If you made a list and gathered all of these items, you'd quickly discover that you only really needed two items from all of these listed! This makes a supply list daunting and confusing at best to make and to follow.
Next, we do not include a supply list because we simply intend for you to open your guide and teach. This means that we actually write the activities intending for you not to have to shop for special supplies. Not having what you need will then be the exception rather than the rule. This thinking stems from my past experience in supply list gathering with many other curriculums through many years of teaching. I was always daunted by the supply gathering, amazed at the expense once all of the supplies were added up, and challenged to find a place to store the supplies to have handy as the year progressed.
This is not the experience we desire for you!
A last reason is that we know many families have multiple children and the gathering and storing of multiple supplies for multiple kiddos can really be a deterrent. Rather than requiring you to read a supply list in each guide that you are using each day, we simply expect you to gather at the moment the experiment or activity arrives. If you are a planner by nature, and I certainly am, then you may find this shift to working without a supply list a challenge at first. But, I encourage you to try teaching the guide as written, without the fervor of supply gathering. We've seen families make supply lists for our guides, only to ditch them as they realized they weren't necessary.
One last benefit of foregoing a supply list is that it enables you to make quick substitutions as needed. The longer you use HOD, the more you'll discover that even if you don't have the exact supply mentioned in the guide you can often easily think of something else that will substitute equally well and is right at hand. This is a wonderful part of teaching right within your own home and was a benefit I could never reap in the public school classroom!
I will also share that it has been a huge blessing for me to see my older kiddos learning to gather their own supplies as they work, put things away after they're done, and think of substitutions that may work when the situation occasionally arises. These are all organizational skills that every kiddo needs to learn and are a by-product of using the guides that I was thrilled to see in practice daily as my kiddos matured.
While there are exceptions to every rule, there is a rhyme and a reason (and much experience in teaching) behind everything we do.
If the planner in me can make this transition, it is possible you can too! If you really feel the need to plan ahead, simply look over the week (or day) before it arrives and jot down the few things you may not have. It will be cheaper on your budget and quicker than gathering for 140-170 days ahead of time and will still allow you to quickly substitute things you may have on hand for those you might be missing from the guide.
Guides that do have unusual supplies (like CTC and its paint supplies or MTMM and its science kits) do have specific supply lists. The Introductions of our guides make sure to mention these things. The rest should be things you really do have in your home.
Blessings,
Carrie