There has never been any lead in a pencil
In the 1560s a storm brought down trees at Borrowdale in Cumbria and exposed a black mineral underneath. Shepherds used it to mark their sheep. It turned out to be graphite, the purest deposit ever found anywhere in the world, but at the time everyone assumed it was a kind of lead — and the name stuck to pencils permanently.
The mine became so valuable that it was flooded on purpose between digs, and armed guards escorted the carts to London. Every PENCIL in Europe depended on one Cumbrian hillside for the best part of two hundred years. Nothing in a modern pencil is remotely poisonous; the graphite is mixed with clay, and more clay makes a harder, fainter line.
Before erasers, mistakes were rubbed out with a lump of stale bread. Then Joseph Priestley noticed in 1770 that a piece of gum from South America removed pencil marks beautifully, and described it as a substance for rubbing out — which is how an entire material ended up being called rubber.
In 1858 Hyman Lipman patented the idea of sticking one on the end of a pencil. He sold the patent for a fortune, and the courts then threw it out: attaching two well-known things to each other, they ruled, is not an invention. The ERASER on the end of a pencil has been free for anybody to copy ever since.
Chalk is made of shells
Real chalk is a rock, and the rock is animals. It formed on the floor of a warm sea around ninety million years ago out of the microscopic armour plates of algae, settling a fraction of a millimetre a year until it was hundreds of metres thick. The White Cliffs of Dover are the edge of that pile.
The CHALK in a modern classroom is usually gypsum rather than the real thing, and squeaks differently for it. A BOARD was black because the early ones were planks painted with egg white and charred potato; the green version arrived in the 1960s and proved easier on the eyes.
Left-handed scissors are a different tool
The handles are the obvious part, but the important difference is inside. In any pair of SCISSORS one blade sits above the other, and cutting works because your grip pushes the two blades against each other as they close. Held in the correct hand, the top blade is on the side your thumb pushes from.
Use the wrong hand and your grip pulls the blades apart instead, so the paper slides into the gap and folds rather than cuts. The child is not being clumsy and the scissors are not blunt. Roughly one in ten children needs the mirrored pair, and a classroom that has four of them has usually lost three.
What is on the desk
Everything for making marks: the PENCIL, CRAYON, MARKER, CHALK and PAINT, plus PAPER, GLUE, a RULER, SCISSORS and an ERASER, kept in a BAG and used at a DESK on a CHAIR in front of a BOARD.
Almost all of it trains the same small set of muscles. Gripping a crayon, snipping with scissors, squeezing GLUE and drawing along a RULER build the finger control handwriting needs later, and that is the real reason nurseries look like craft shops. The rest of the list is the part children remember: the TEACHER, the CLASS, their FRIENDS, READING and LUNCH.