Very popular with elementary school teachers, these hardcover blank books let students create their own storybooks. (Middle-schoolers interviewing and making books for primary grade kids is a popular and civilizing project.) Also great for sketching, journaling or scrapbooking. Pure white blank covers with (14) sheets (28 pages) of 80-lb blank paper inside with a sewn-in binding. You pick the 6” x 8” books or the 8-1/2” x 11” versions.

Coated white, these ceramic magnets look kind of like little donuts, each 7/8" dia x 1/2" thick with an 11/32” ID and a pull of approx 1 lb. Extremely handy for the fridge, steel file cabinet or wherever you hang photos, notes to self, to-do lists and stuff you tear out of magazines and newspapers.

Titled "The Field and Forest Handy Book," this volume has been justifiably in print since 1906. Written by Daniel C. "Uncle Dan" Beard, the founder of the Sons of Daniel Boone and one of the founders of the BSA, it's a compendium of eternally relevant woodland lore, from building cabins, sleds, boats, and bridges to camping in swamps. The only part we skipped was on how to cook a muskrat. (We know a place that delivers.) Loaded with illustrations. In soft cover from David Godine's Nonpareil Books, 428 pages.

One pen, ten colors. Develop complicated note-taking systems, or just send colorful hate mail with this 6-1/4" long ballpoint with cartridges in black, orange, dark green, purple, light green, red, brown, magenta, blue and aqua. Slide the button of the matching color to write, push the top down to release it. Assorted colored barrels.

If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

Learn atomic weights while winning money from your classmates. Here’s a double deck of (104) cards plus (4) jokers all stored in a stylish box because no one wants to lose their gold, krypton or rubidium. In addition to the standard playing card values, the decks cover the periodic table of elements. Each card includes one element’s atomic number, symbol, series, melting and boiling points, period/group, uses, est. atomic weight, standard state, and the element’s name in English. Includes instructions for (2) educational games if you aren’t in the mood for canasta or two games of hearts. Up to date 6th Edition for all your fraction of a second elements.

What we have here are 96-sheet, white genuine Post-It note pads, 4” wide x just shy of 3” tall with adhesive strips on the top edge. Plus, for mysterious reasons, the samples we received have letters or names (mostly girl names) strung across the top margin in pink, blue or green. Just ignore them and play a little Post-It note roulette. We'll stick our hand in the over-sized box and pull out 10. That’s why they call it surplus and that is why genuine Post-It notes are this cheap.

Like Martha Stewart if you poured honey all over her. Also like these little 4-1/4” x 3-1/4” hardbound books of art-themed sticky notes. You pick: The Bob (The Joy of Painting) Ross pack, with approx (240) notes in large and small sizes with Bob, his easel or landscape scenes like the ones he painted; or the Frames collection, with approx (240) notes with white space inside various frames in large and smaller sizes, to make your notes immortal.

Start them out right with this (profusely) hand-illustrated, 96-page book: The Story of Inventions. Includes toasters, toilets, television, computers, cars, chocolate bars, dishwashers, pianos, flying machines, bicycles and blue jeans among many others. Includes a timeline, glossary and index. No age recommendations, but we like it for pretty much anyone.

Yes, this grade C8 ceramic magnet is beastly--a monster, measuring 6" X 4" X 1" thick with a conservatively rated pull of 35 lbs, 3850 gauss. Powerful and, like all ceramic magnets, brittle, so keep it away from your laptop and don’t drop it or you may have several little beastly magnets. Use it to hold tools in the shop, or knives in the kitchen--or paint a bull’s eye on it and toss paper clips at it.

You can’t beat the original, genuine, authentic, standard, classic, fine-point Sharpie® permanent black marker with the pocket-clip cap. Just can’t. Accept no substitutes, unless we say it’s OK. Our each is a pack of two!

Our favorite oxymoronic item. It’s a series of flat political maps of the world mounted on a 3” cube instead of a globe. The spindle goes into Antarctica and the whole thing stands just under 6” tall, spinning on an approx 4” dia base. Could be the perfect birthday present for your flat-earther uncle Morty.

Nice little teaching magnet set for the primary grade classroom has (6) magnets in star, two-bar, horseshoe and ring shapes, all plastic coated in silver and red to mark the poles. Range in size from 1” to 3”, and include a few paper clips and small nails for demo purposes.

We’re gonna tell you how it’s gonna be. Faded markings on boxes and everything else are a thing of the past with these Sharpie® Extreme Fade Resistant markers. In dark blue, with a fine-point tip.

Nice rare-earth neodymium disk magnet, 1" dia, about the same as a quarter but over twice as thick at 4mm. Rare-earth magnets are permanent and powerful, and this one has approx 7 lbs pull, and always will. Comes with a galvanized metal keeper approx 2" dia so you don't lose it.

We just learned that. You’d think we’d have known. Now we do. They’re sort of like round dreidels, with a hollowed-out middle around the stem, which causes them to turn themselves upside down while they’re spinning. Great lesson in center-of-mass instruction for physics teachers. Includes an explanatory booklet with activities and discussion topics. You’ll get (3) wooden tops at 7/8”, 1-1/4” and 1-1/2” dia.

All you add is sunlight to use this 50-foot long solar balloon to prove that Bernoulli was right. Pascal, too. Demonstrate buoyancy, convection, thermodynamics and the power of the sun. Measures 29" dia and comes with 400 feet of string, and instructions.