Who comes up with this stuff?

Tomorrow Channah goes to meet her kita aleph teacher.  As a new kita aleph student we got the requisite book and supply lists in the mail.  There was a math book ("cheshbon"- and actually I think there are 4 of them) and a learn to read book, and an intro to chumash book and a bunch of others.  We had to get pencils and erasers and a pencil case.  My mom took her for a brand new school back and she got a trolley thing to cart her million pounds of stuff back and forth every day.

She also had to buy notebooks.

When I was in elementary school learning to write in Hebrew we had special "machbarot" with a picture of a bunch of old men learning and a menorah on the front filled with lines they told us were the lines they used in Israel.  

This stuff.

Everyone had to get a whole bunch of them at the beginning of every year and we used them instead of foolscap paper for all our Hebrew subjects until at least 5th grade- probably longer but as I never did any of my homework anyway I could be remembering that wrong.

So imagine how surprised I was to get to picking out her notebooks, only to discover that she had 3 types of notebooks to get.  Regular lined, graph paper for math, and totally blank.  Not a single red widely spaced line in sight!

I asked Channah's OT today about finding some as I thought it might help her handwriting and she looked at me like I was crazy.  She told me it was only for Americans!  I commented on it on my facebook page and got the surprise of my life.  

Turns out that what I always thought of as Israeli paper is here called a "machberet Anglit" (and English notebook) and is used for teaching kids to write in English!