The Intentional Thrifter shops for parts

I bought four things at the thrift store this morning: a wooden organizer box, a set of four cloth placemats, and two personal-planner binders for a dollar apiece, just for their innards. Total, seven Canadian dollars (U.S.$5.42 right now).

Here is the box. Nothing special, just useful. 

Maybe for paper?

Maybe for hot pads? 

The lid could also be useful.

Here are the place mats.

One by itself would look nice with this strawberry plate.

One of the binders was six-ring, but the included paper fits my own planner perfectly. Also included: some Stephen R. Covey planning advice. Just a bonus.

 The other notebook had a special binding system with plastic buttons, so the paper doesn't work in a regular binder. But we did end up with a bunch of loose paper for grocery lists, Scrabble games, and phone messages. Also some sticky page markers.

I can't use these dividers and page protectors, but I'll leave them by the elevator in our building, where people share stuff like that.

And this small pile of stuff is going in the garbage. The pen didn't work, and I didn't need the other hardware and plastic inserts.

But I still got my money's worth.

Quote for the day: In defense of reluctant writers

From Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906), by G. Stanley Hall, , Ph.D., LL.D., President of Clark University and Professor of Psychology And Pedagogy 

Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamopapyrus [Pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this country.  Not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. In some schools, teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion.

My favourite graph paper generator

Easy to print your own centimeter-sized graph paper. Great for using with Cuisenaire rods! Or for cutting up for this Family Math activity--thanks, Jimmie! (I don't think our "number line" is going to be that big, but I appreciate the warning.)

[Update: we decided to go with 1-inch squares for the number timeline, rather than 1 cm--easier to cut out and work with.]