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Easy ways to cut home education costs.
One of the criticisms often levelled at home education is the cost of resources, and it’s true that if you shop new for everything, it’s easy to spend a lot. We’re past masters at hunting down bargains though, and we’ve had some fantastic finds of charity shop science kits recently. This is even though we don’t make it into town nearly as regularly as we used to before the move. Our routine now is twice a week, instead of most days, and I don’t always make it round all the shops every week. I pretty much always pop in to Basic Life Charity, not least as that’s the one I tend to donate to, but the rest are hit and miss.
Charity shop science kit of the day : Nickolodean Experimake Sludge and Slime
Despite this, we’ve found some great science kits at fabulous prices in charity shops, and this weekend’s top bargain was a Nickolodean Experimake Sludge and Slime. A quick google tells me this was probably a The Works bargain for someone at £10 – but ended up at the RSPCA shop, pretty much untouched, where we picked it up for £1.50.
It’s a great kit. There’s a little booklet with multiple different experiments, each fully explained, and all sorts of useful bits of experimental reusable things like test tubes, and pipettes and measuring cups. It even still had the all important cornflour and various slightly scary looking chemicals completely untouched. I think the only thing missing from the original contents was the gloves, and we dye hair and clothes here, so I have gloves aplenty.
Tigerboy wanted to explore non newtonian liquids, because who wouldn’t, so that meant not terribly scary chemicals fortunately. To minimise mess I set him up in the bathroom where he was alternately vigorous and gentle with his liquid come solid, and that was science fairly well covered for the day.
Other kits we recommend
We’ve amassed quite a heap of these science kits from charity shops recently for very low prices – including a Galt magnetic lab with the stickers missing which only cost us £2. It still has all the magnets which let’s face it, are the fun bits – and that was science fairly well covered that day too.
I’m still waiting for him to get around to using the Galt bubble lab but given the way the temperature has dropped over the last few days, I’m not sure he’s going to want to spend that much time out in the garden blowing bubbles. Maybe we’ll hang on to that one for next year.
Science isn’t all he does, but it is the thing he’s most interested in, so I’m always happy to indulge in a spot of retail therapy that can also pass for education. I’m really glad that science is one of his interests, and I’m sure it’ll take him a long way.
By the way, if you were reading here for the more personal stuff about me and neurodiversity and figuring myself out, I’m shifting that to substack. Hope to see you there!