To Buy or Not to Buy a School Supply Kit?

With the start of school fast approaching us, many parents and guardians are finding themselves lined up at the stores buying supplies and realizing that the price for all these items are adding up fast. With people wanting to save money, some companies have tuned into their wishes and started producing school supply kits.

A school supply kit is a pre-packaged kit with all the materials in it that a child may need throughout the school year. The kit contains, in some cases, one item each of crayons, markers, glue, pencils, erasers, folders, paints, and so on. These kits are not always filled with the name brand items such as Crayola for crayons, but in some cases an off brand version of the item you need. If you would like to take a look for reference on what a school kit contains click on over to www.kitsforkidz.com. They have pre-packed school supply kits for three different age levels, 4-8, 9-11, and 11-14.

The kits at the Kitz for Kidz link start off at $13.00, minus shipping and handling. This is the cheapest kits I have found by far. I have seen some that reach well into the $50.00 mark. So, now that you understand what a school supply kit is, the question still remains : are the school supply kits really the way I should go, or should I stick to my child's classroom supply list?

To be honest with you, the answer to this question is just a personal preference. You do have to weigh the pro's and con's on each side. So let us do just that. First off a pre-packaged school supply kit starts off at $13.00. Not a bad price. Now I know that this year alone my second grader, who attends school in Georgia had a list that totaled around $20.00. However, the items on my list all came from Wal-Mart, one of the cheaper stores, but also all the items were name brand. I did not have to pay for shipping like you do with www.kitsforkidz.com and remember those sites offer the items in non-name brand supplies.

Second, If you take a look at your child's supply list it varies from school to school, and grade to grade. One year your child may need four boxes of crayons and the next they may only need one, on top of that there is some items they need and some items they do not. When you buy a school supply kit, you are buying everything in that kit at one price. It may come down to it that you may not need all those items in the kit. You may find yourself stuck with two extra boxes of crayons, markers, and folders that you did not need. Yes, all these things can be donated for other kids or into other classrooms and possibly other schools. However, in my eyes, extra supplies just mean wasted cash. I think that you will do just fine if you go out and buy "exactly" what you need on the supply list for your child.

So in conclusion, I think that you should not buy a school supply kit because in all reality it just means extra things you do not even need. However, I said before this is personal preference and you need to weight out those pro's and con's on your own terms to see if this really is the right choice for you!