My latest favorite office supply

It's these handy doodads:
I love these things! I never had much luck with regular bookmarks, as they just tend to fall out and get lost. But these little tabs ... being made by the Post It note folks at 3-M, of course ... STICK.

In my 13 years of homeschoolings, I never cease to be amazed at how it's sometimes the littlest things that make the day go more smoothly. Like having pencils by the gross, a couple of electric pencil sharpeners, a little waste basket for each room where we do school... and now I can't live without these colorful little sticky tabs.

I have them all over the house in lots of colors because we use them to mark:

• the current math page
• the page we're supposed to get to by the end of the week (in a different color)
• the page we hope to get to by the end of first quarter (yet another color)
• the current page in the Greek drama we're reading aloud
• different sections of notebooks
• different sections of looseleaf binders
• paragraphs in a paper that need revising

They have cool little dispensers for them, too, but I can't find a photo of the one we have. I think they must have discontinued it. Which is a shame, because it sort of looks like the cone of a rocket ship, but in a rounded-off pyramidal shape, in shades of aquamarine and bright white. Each side dispenses two different colors of the skinny flags. It makes quite a design statment, though I'm not really sure what it's saying.

I also love the history of Post It notes. It's become part of the lore of American ingenuity, serendipity in discovery, and dare I say, "stick-to-it-ivness" (ha!), as Dr. Silver of 3-M discovered the glue in 1968, but it took five more years before a colleague, Art Fry, came up with a use for it, and it wasn't until 1980 that Post It notes were rolled out across the entire country.

There's your little snippet of American office supplies history for the day. And you probably won't be too excited about that, unless you are, like me, an office supplies nut.