The Library Game

My kids L.O.V.E books. We can seriously never have enough. We used to go to the library every week until our 2 year old ripped one page and another book might have been ripped by her but might not have...anyway A LOT of money later and I couldn't afford the library anymore! So now I go to yard sales primarily to find new books.

We have been trying to move for 2 years now and all the non essentials in the house have been packed up for about that long (LOOOOONG STORY!). So to keep things fresh and to reduce clutter I packed up almost all the books and every week or so I grab a huge pile, lay it out on the couch for the kids to pick from, give them one of my credit cards or other plastic type cards and we play library. They each get to pick out 5. They bring them to me and I swipe their card and we check each book out and then we all sit together and read them all. We put all of the unpicked books (including the previous weeks') back in a box. So much better then 100 books being dispersed around the house every day by my 2 year old.

The kids really do get sooo excited and we seem to be reading even more with this method. I don't get tired of the books like I used to when we would read the same books 3 times a day for 3 months at a time! I think it is a win win. We still go to the real library sometimes because ours is seriously the coolest building ever but I get so nervous about torn pages that I don't let them look at them by themselves--which is one of their favorite parts.

I have even been able to get my kids to clean up without complaining when I tell them we'll play the library game once the room is clean. It's amazing how quickly they can do things when they want to! Happy Reading!!!