Do you let your child buy books at her school book fair? What about from those Scholastic book club catalogs that get sent home? How do you do it? By price (i.e. a dollar limit)? By number of books?
I must admit, I'm really a book snob. And cheap. Or, as I like to put it, discriminating. My daughters already know that some books are library books - that is, books that are not worth buying. Her school is running the book fair differently this year (and with, admittedly, higher quality books this year and last (not Scholastic) than in past years). The children come visit the fair, write down titles they want, and give the list to their parents, who are under no obligation to buy the listed books. My daughter is so well-trained (or perhaps I am so cruel), that she wrote "(library)" next to some of her choices, telling me that she knows I won't buy them but that she'd like to take them out of the library. However, I'll consider buying two of her better choices, both of which are books she's already read: The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies and The Magical Ms. Plum by Bonny Becker.
How does your school run its book fairs and how does your family participate?
I let Ben buy what he wanted--Rifka didn't have one--but my ambivalence got sharper when one of the neighbor kids, a good friend of Ben's, said he was blue because his mother (an immigrant who doesn't speak English; a number of signs point to a family with less money than we have) didn't give him money for book fair. On the one hand, if they're going to buy anything at school, I'm into books. On the other hand, I hated to see Adrian suffer, and I didn't know an appropriate way to help.
ReplyDeleteI just wrote a long comment and hope that it didn't disappear into outer space. I'm hoping you have comment moderation on or something.
ReplyDeleteAh, now I see it did disappear but I am too tired to retype.
DeleteOh no! Perhaps you can recreate it tomorrow.
Deletego cheap!
ReplyDelete