What you need

Three things come from a store: craft sticks, small bands and linking cubes. Everything else is in a kitchen, a desk drawer or a purse. Gather the first list before the first sitting, add from the second as the grades come, and take the third from the house when a chapter asks for it. Each sitting’s Before you start says exactly what to set out that day.

Before the first sitting

• 500 craft sticks. Plain wood, the ordinary 4½ × ⅜ inch kind. Keep to one size for all six years, because a stick is the book’s first unit of length.
• About 50 small bands. Small hair elastics without metal, which hold ten sticks snugly when doubled. Ten sticks in a band make a bundle. Blue ones match the drawings; choose latex-free if anyone at home reacts to latex.
• 4 large bands, to tie ten bundles into a hundred-bundle.
• 12 IOU sticks, made from the 500. With a black marker, draw a large cross on both faces of a stick. A band always means a ten, so an IOU stick wears a cross, never a band.
• 100 linking cubes, 2 centimeters (about ¾ inch), that link on every side. The blue ones and the orange ones stand for two quantities.
• A blue pencil and an orange pencil. Blue is the first quantity and orange the second, in every grade.
• A roll of adding-machine tape, from which she cuts her own strips. Strips cut lengthwise from printer paper will do.
• Clear tape and painter’s tape. Painter’s tape holds a ribbon where it cannot be moved, and lifts cleanly from a floor.
• Two pairs of scissors: hers, and a strong pair for you, because Part 0 cuts sticks to half and two-thirds of their length.
• Two ten-frames: a row of five squares above a row of five, drawn on cardboard.
• A graph-paper notebook each year, with half-inch squares in grade 1, 1 cm squares in grade 2, and 5 mm squares from grade 3 (five to the inch will do). In grade 1 it starts when the pages of the First Book end.
• A lidded box. A shoebox holds the whole kit, and the lid keeps the small things from a toddler.

Added in later grades

Grade 2

• A ruler with centimeters on one edge and inches on the other.
• A clock with hands. A paper plate with two cardboard hands will do.
• 10 hundred cards: index cards marked 100. A hundred card stands in for a hundred-bundle when the sticks run out.
• For Excursion 13: about 60 meters (65 yards) of painter’s tape for a floor grid, which is two rolls, or sidewalk chalk on a driveway.

Grade 3

• A learning clock whose hands are geared, so that the hour hand creeps on as the minute hand turns.
• A meter stick, or a tape measure marked in millimeters.
• A kitchen scale that reads grams, an empty 1-liter bottle and a measuring cup.
• 13 digit cards: 0 to 9 on index cards, and three more 0s.
• About 10 paper plates, uncoated, so that she can draw on them and cut them.
• More coins: 50 more pennies (100 in all), 10 nickels and 4 quarters.

Grade 4

• Paper money: twenty one-dollar bills, a ten and a twenty.
• Garden snips or kitchen shears, to cut a craft stick into ten splinters in Chapter 24. Scissors split the wood.

Grade 5

• 100 more linking cubes, of the same make, so that they link with the first hundred.
• A drawing compass that locks its width with a screw or a wheel and opens to at least 12 centimeters (about 5 inches). A loose one drifts, and the lesson is lost.
• For Excursion 13: about 84 meters (92 yards) of painter’s tape for a larger floor grid (two rolls), or chalk outdoors; and three broom handles, or three 2-meter strips of tape, for the walking triangle.

Grade 6

• Paper money: twenty-five one-dollar bills, sixty dimes, and a five, a ten and a twenty for the store game of Chapter 25.
• 8 more IOU sticks, for the trading game of Excursion 19, which uses 20. Mark them as you marked the first twelve.
• For Excursion 14, if you wish: a cork tile about 12 inches square, 15 push pins, about 40 beads no wider than ⅝ inch, and thin cardboard, such as the side of a cereal box, for the walls of the bins. The first sitting shows how to build it.
• For Excursion 15: two socks or small cloth bags; six orange and five blue counters that feel alike (linking cubes will do); about forty bottle caps.
• For Excursion 17, outdoors: two straight sticks about a meter long, such as broom handles, four stakes, and string.

From the kitchen and the drawers

Part 0 needs the first five from its first sitting.

• A 1-pound bag of dried beans, large and flat, such as lima or pinto, so that they do not roll. Part 0 uses about forty. Avoid raw red kidney beans: a few, eaten raw, make a child ill.
• A balance: a coat hanger with a small bag tied to each end, hung from a doorknob, or a bought bucket balance. It must tip for a small difference, and by Excursion 16 for a single stick.
• Two jugs or bottles of different shapes, and a cup, for pouring.
• About 6 yards of ribbon or cotton string (a small roll) that does not stretch. Yarn and elastic cord stretch, so they cannot measure.
• Pencils of different lengths, and a book with a straight edge to push the ends of sticks against.
• 12 small cups, paper or plastic, and 2 egg cartons for counting by twelves in Chapter 2.
• 50 pennies and 20 dimes. Real coins are better than paper ones.
• 4 dice, two dark and two light, so that two can be told apart.
• About two dozen dried lentils, one for each player of the two race games in her Grade 1 book and one for each stick of the heap in its Chapter 2 (No. 281). A lentil sits on one square of the games’ chart and path, where a bean covers two or three.
• A pack of 3 × 5 inch index cards.
• Odds and ends, as the chapters ask: bottle caps or buttons, a dozen small stickers, a little modeling clay, paper plates, crackers and a few small toys.

What it costs. Most of this is already in a home. Of what you buy, 500 craft sticks cost about $5 to $15, and a hundred linking cubes about $14, at 2026 prices.

Don’t buy these. The book makes them, draws them, or does without them.

• Base-ten blocks. Their tens come already tied, and tying the bundle herself is the action the book rests on.
• Fraction tiles or circles. She makes fractions from paper strips, paper plates and crackers.
• Boards for ten-frames, hundred charts or number lines. Draw them on graph paper.
• A protractor or spinners. She folds a protractor from a paper circle in Excursion 13, and a paper clip spun on a pencil point is a spinner.
• Timers, stopwatches and flash cards. The book never times her.

Small parts. Cubes, beans, lentils, coins, dice, bands, buttons and bottle caps are small enough to choke a child under three. Keep them in the lidded box, out of a toddler’s reach, and count them back in at the end of a sitting. Push pins, the compass, the snips and the strong scissors stay in your drawer.

The card sheet at witheveryreason.org/card-sheet.pdf has ten-frames, hundred cards, digit cards and paper money to print. You can also draw them all by hand. Two more sheets are there: plain strips in 1 cm squares, for doing a sitting again with fresh pieces, and the number path from her Grade 1 book, two to a page, with squares half an inch wide, big enough for a pinto bean.