Our family happily jumped at the chance to donate school supplies to children unable to buy their own supplies! We participated in a sponsored post for Collective Bias®. We made a donation of glue sticks, crayons, and erasers!

School supply shopping

Going back to school shopping in July and August isn’t all that out of the ordinary for our family. School supply shopping for our family is completed in June, before the kids are out of school for the summer. However, when back-to-school sales start up, we’re big on shopping for kids who aren’t always able to buy their own supplies.

Donating school supplies

Although we get school supplies back in June, there’s always a couple of things we forget, or wait to buy. A few weeks ago we scored a Tinker Bell backpack for Little Miss, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle lunch bag for The Boy. Awesome. Just to make sure, before we headed out to DuaneReade to do our Operation Backpack donation, I double checked to make sure I was wasn’t missing anything from each back to school list.

It’s the first year BOTH kids have real, honest-to-goodness school supply lists.

Getting organized before back to school shopping

All supplies were sorted, and once done, we took stock of supplies. What the heck was missing? Plastic folders for both kids, fine point dry erase markers (only black, ARGH) for both kids, and twistable colored pencils for the boy! WHAT? Mr. Sunflower missed a few important supplies! Now it was up to me to hunt for their final items, as well as donation items.

Summer’s over

As many parents do each summer vacation, I forced the kids to read. However, it wasn’t without rewards! Each kid filled out summer reading lists for a few different places:

• local public library
• our local movie theatre
• TD Bank

Each list garnered free goodies, as well as little perks like a library party, a free movie, and best of all, MONEY!

As you can imagine, the first stop we made was the bank to submit their reading list, as well as use the coin machine to deposit their coins. After smiles of delight from using the machine, we headed to one of our favorite stores on Long Island, Duane Reade! Any store that has a program like Operation Backpack giving back to our community, is a favorite in my book!

Duane Read’s Operation Backpack

See the phony smile? Yeah, she’s all kinds of annoyed she has to wait for her mom to get all her social media responsibilities done for our shopping trip. Once released, though, she bee-lined to the school supplies aisle.

We found our plastic folders for the kids.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find much more than that from their lists. It’s all good, we’ll go back closer to September. No worries, we know Duane Reade won’t fail us! Luckily, we did find some goodies for donations! We bought glue sticks, crayons, and erasers (latex free, of course.)

Once we purchased everything, we hustled over to the box displayed in the store. Each of the kids placed the donations in the box. Or, in The Boy’s case, THREW the items in the box……which made me cringe, but nothing was super breakable. Let’s hope all 24 crayons are still in tact.

We done good, kids! And hey, Duane Reade, we’ll be back to shop another day for our missing items……and more goodies! Of course, I’ll make sure to use my Balance Rewards card, too. I saved $15.10 on this trip thanks to my Balance Rewards. Saving more money translates into donating more glue sticks! How does one not love giving back to kids?!!!!

*Disclosure: I am a member of the Collective Bias® Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and their client.