I am sending the following items to a homeschool mother of three young children who lives in the states. In return she will be sending me goodies representive of the area in which she is from. I wish I could send her back food but postal rates are expensive and food packages can be heavy. I have instead, after much thought, decided to send stationery products that French children use, some of which can only be found in France.

The first item is a ruler. French children use a ruler that uses the metric system. This particular ruler is 20cm long and is for a young child because there is a grip in the middle for little fingers to hold.

French children learn to write cursive from as young as five. They practice penmanship on a small whiteboard that measures 19cm x 26cm. The older students in elementary use the opposite side of the white board (which is blank) during math class to note down their answers to show during lesson time.

There are three sizes of exercise books. These two are the most commonly used. The smaller book is for the younger student, the larger for the older student. The small book on the left has a plastic cover that most young children are required to put on their books to keep them clean. Sometimes students purchase books with cartoon pics etc that distract during class time and as such is another reason why teachers like their books covered to prevent eyes from roaming. The covers can be removed after the student has finished with the book and used again. There are covers to fit all three sized exercise books.

These are the lines from the exercise books that French children learn to write on. The lines are the same size for both younger students and older students. Young students learn to write their letters by using four lines, when they get older they will use three lines with the small letters reaching to the first line. French children learn to write cursive from the beginning and have very beautiful penmanship. It is very impressive to walk into a classroom of young students to view their work.

This is a homework notebook. Children from as young as six years old are encouraged to write down their homework for each day. By the time they finish elementary they are fully responsible for their own work making sure they have all assignments and projects completed on time and not rely on mum or dad to remind them.

This is a folder containing plastic sleeves. It is lightweight and can be found holding 20, 40, 60 or 100 pages. Young children use these folders to display their finished work.

This is a page from a math exercise book. There are two line sizes, a larger size (not pictured) for young children and a smaller size (pictured here) for the older student). I remember using exercise books like this when I was little. When I homeschooled these were the books I couldn’t find in any stationery store in the states, so whenever I was in New Zealand or Australia I would always stock up on these. I like them because children from as young as six can learn to keep their numerals in the correct columns when calculating large sums which help make for good habits when moving to a blank page, or a lined exercise book.