Short and sweet, I just had to share this cute idea I came up with while I was cleaning the disaster that is my craft room. 

This little gift cost me all of $1.  One set of rubber tool-shaped erasers from Dollar Tree (the pliers actually move!), and a re-purposed Home Depot gift card box that was hanging out on my wrapping paper shelf.

Dollar Tree doesn't always have the tool erasers, so you have to snap them up when you see them. Pull the inside gift card holder out of the little tool box and discard. All four tools fit perfectly inside the little box, and it's small enough to carry around in your diaper bag or purse to be used as a "busy bag" to keep your kid occupied at a store or restaurant.

Dollar Tree for the win (again!)

My daughter's preschool is a very small, private school so they don't have a library on site.  Her teacher asked for volunteers to go to the library every month and check out some books on that month's theme.  I love children's books, so I thought this would be a great way to volunteer for my daughter's class, and the beauty of it is... I can do it in my pajamas, whenever I have time, without leaving the comfort of my home.

Now, how hard can it possibly be, you think?  You just go to the library and ask for books on rain forests, right?  Well, our local library is pretty small and has a very limited selection, so I learned that ordering the books on the library district's website is the best way to go.  In our district, you can order books from any district library and have them delivered to your local library.  You just drive over and pick them up.

Still seems pretty simple... why do we need a whole blog post about it?  Well, after doing it for the past 5 months, I've learned some tricks that can make it easier and I also have some tips about how to find books that will provide the best experience for the little ones.

Find out if your library district has a website where you can order books or put them on hold.  If they don't, then you can stop reading now, because that's what this post is all about.  If they do, get yourself an account and then... Get on the website and figure out how to use it. 

Figure out how to:

• Search for a title or author
  
• Filter the search results
  
• Order books or put them on hold
  
• Cancel holds
  
• Suspend holds (if they have this feature)
  
• See all the books you have on hold
  
• See all the books you have checked out
  
• See when your books are due.  If you're really lucky, your library might have a way to email you when your books are going to be due.  Mine automatically does this the day before they're due.
  

There are several methods that I use to find books for a certain subject.  I start with one, and if that doesn't yield good enough results, then I'll move on to others.  Certain subjects are easier to find than others.  Our library has a million preschool-level books on farms, but almost nothing on Native Americans.

First, I put the search term into the search box and hit the Search button.  Then I get a bunch of filters on the left side.  (Your library may be different, hopefully they have a way to filter search results.)

For preschool, I like to filter by Shelf Location - Children's Easy first.  If I don't find enough, I'll start the search over and filter by Shelf Location - Children's Non-Fiction, Audience - Children, or Material Type - Children's Book.  The latter ones will return results for all ages, so there's some sleuthing to be done to find books that are geared toward preschoolers.

When I find a book that I think looks good, I'll look it up on Amazon to see if I think it's a good fit.  I look at the recommended age range, the reviews, and the book preview if there's one available.  This way, I can see if the book is written at an appropriate level.

If the search results don't return enough books, I'll try to search some other terms.  For example, when I searched for "Native American", I got almost nothing that was age-appropriate.  But when I searched for "Indians", I got more.

If searching the library's website doesn't return enough good results, I'll move to another method:  Google.  For example, I'll search for "books preschool South America."  This always gives me a number of websites from homeschoolers and other blogs that have Top-10-type lists for children's books on the given subject.  I'll find one that looks good, and then do a search in my library for it.  About 7 times out of 10, it's there and I just didn't see it for some reason.  I also check these out on Amazon just to make sure they're appropriate.

I don't just grab the first 10 books I see on a subject, I like to get books that have good educational value or a message that pertains to the subject.  Notice I said "that pertains to the subject".  When I was looking for books on farms, I found a very highly rated book about two ducklings who went on an adventure together and got into some trouble.  Ducks are a farm animal, and the book had a good message.  But the message was not about farms, it was about working together and relationships, etc.  You could have substituted any animal or (person for that matter) in the book and it would not have changed the story.  So, I passed it by and chose books about different farm animals, what happens on a farm, machines that are used on a farm, etc.

I also try to step outside the box a little bit, knowing that my daughter's teacher reads every book herself before she reads it to the class.  When she told me they were doing "winter and Christmas", I thought, hmm, there are other holidays around this time besides Christmas.  So, I looked for books on Hanukkah and other holidays.  I also looked for books on how other countries celebrate Christmas.  When she said they were doing Africa, I easily found books on African animals, but then I tried hard to find books on the African people and culture.  If I find a really good book that's maybe a little bit too old for the class, I'll get it anyway.  I figure the teacher can decide herself if she thinks it's a good fit.

4.  Request the books (put them on hold)

My library's website has a feature that allows you to put the books on hold, and then they will transfer them from their "home" library to my local library.  After I have requested the hold, I look at my hold list and it shows what number I am in the queue.  If my queue number is more than 2, I will just cancel the hold.  It's not likely that I will get the book in time for it to be used in the current month.  (If it's a book I REALLY want, I might leave it anyway, in hopes that it will arrive in time.)

One new thing I learned this time is that you can suspend your hold.  For example, if you are on a long waiting list for a certain popular book, and you are afraid your turn will come up while you are on vacation, you can suspend your hold for the time you're on vacation while still keeping your place in line.  This can be helpful to me in two ways:

1. I can do my searches early, say the middle of the previous month, put everything on hold and then suspend my hold until a week before I need the books.  That way I'm not checking them out too early and by the time I get them, the new month is starting and the class can keep them for a full three weeks of the month.  I usually renew them so the class can keep them for the whole month, but it won't let me renew if there's someone else waiting for it.
   
2. I can put Christmas books on hold in October and then suspend my hold until a week before December.  That way, I am first in line for the Christmas books I want and I won't find myself 3rd, 4th, 5th in line for the good books (like I was last Christmas.)  This will work for any theme that has to do with a time of year when everyone else is checking out books on that same theme.  I really, really wanted Madame President for President's Day, but I never got it :-(
   

When the books arrive at my local library, I get an email.  They usually don't arrive all at once... some will show up in a couple days and then others will show up later.  They will only hold the books for so many days (I think it's 3), so I usually wait a day or so to see if any more books will come in before I go over there.

One thing I have started doing is taking a picture with my phone of the spines of the books while I am in the classroom dropping them off.  This way, I know that all the books were delivered, so if one comes up missing, I can prove that it was in the school.  I just put the books all together so all the spines are visible, and take one picture.

My library sends an email the day before a book is due, but this doesn't work for me because school is not open every day.  If the book is due on Sunday, I'll get the email on Saturday and will have no way of getting into the school to get the book.  I wish there was a way to set it to some other number of days, but there isn't.  So I set a reminder on my Google calendar to send me an email a week before.  If we are still in the current month, I will try to renew all the books so the class can keep them until the end of the month.  Usually, there's at least one that will not renew because someone else is waiting, so I'll have to go pick it up and turn it back in.

I have learned that my local library sometimes misses books that are turned in, or they don't scan right or something.  So again, I have started to take a photo of the spines of the books when I'm at the library before turning them in.  That way, if they say that I didn't turn something in, I'll have proof that I did.

So this was my (very long-winded) explanation of how I get books for my daughter's preschool class.  It's a great way to volunteer if you work during the week and can't actually volunteer in the classroom.  Just make sure you have an understanding with the school of how the books will be treated and who is going to pay the fine if they lose or damage a book.  In our case, they keep the books in a closet, and only the teacher is allowed to get them out.  She reads one and then puts it back so the kids can't destroy it, and she doesn't allow other teachers to use them either.  It has worked well for us so far, and the kids love the variety of books they get to read every day.

When I saw a post about starting a Mommy and Me Book Club on ToddlerApproved.com, I thought this would be a great idea for my local MOMS Club. I love the idea of pairing a book with a related craft, and themed food is always fun. I also thought it would be a good idea to do some kind of movement activity, since sitting and listening to a book, then sitting and doing a craft is a lot of sitting for a young kid.

I did a search on Pinterest for “book and craft” combinations and ended up finding this Build Your Own Alien play dough project that was perfect. This was paired with a book called Aliens Love Underpants, but I couldn’t think of an effective way to provide a selection of ‘underpants’ for a large group of kids. Laminating is expensive and then I would have to cut them all out by hand. So, I looked for other alien books and found these two at my local library.

The illustrations in these books are fantastic and I loved the stories. Because much of the story is actually in the pictures, they’re really best for reading at a one-on-one level to a child so they can study the pictures. But to make sure that the children understood what was going on, I pointed out different things in the illustrations, and talked to the group: “What’s he doing?”, “What’s going on here?”, “What are they seeing up in the sky?”, “Look at the crazy ice cream,” etc.

I'm always looking for an excuse to make cookies, so I created these little dudes using a fire hydrant cutter and an upside-down Mickey head with the top of the ears cut off.

My inspiration came from these two cookies, the left from Lila Loa and the right from Collaboration with Cakes.

The items I provided for the “invitation to create” mostly came from the Dollar Tree. A pack of different sized googly eyes, metallic pipe cleaners, tiny rattles from the party favor section (they looked like alien heads to me), and hinged ball-knockers (okay that sounds really, umm, anyway). For the ball-knockers, I popped the ball part off the handle and provided the pieces separately. My friend had given me some Mardi Gras beads left over from a party, so I cut those up. Then I had some wooden beads that had come off an abacus that I bought in the dollar section at Target a while back. It broke after a time and I kept the beads for future use.  The sectioned trays are also from the Dollar Tree, I bought them two years ago for my daughter’s second birthday party when I had a taco bar. They were the perfect alien green.

I made the play dough with this recipe from Tinker Lab. I like to add the coloring in the pan while the mixture is still liquid. I find that adding the color later results in a sticky dough, so I’ve always done it this way. I used Americolor Electric Green.

For the movement activity, I came up with a sort of relay that had the kids running, criss-crossing my backyard to different stations. Though I’ve numbered the stations here to make things clear, they did not actually have numbers when we did it. The idea was that the kids were searching for moon rocks, but first they had to pick up space junk and then fix their rocket ship.

So, the kids had to run over to the space junk and grab a couple, run to the bags and toss the space junk in, run to the spare parts and grab one, run to the rocket ship and put it on, and then run to get a moon rock and then give it to their mom.  Then they did it over and over again until all the moon rocks were gone, and those kiddos were out of breath!

In hindsight, one rule I should have explained more carefully is that each kid was only allowed to take one moon rock at a time, because some of the kids were grabbing handfuls at a time, and one kid ended up with a ton while other kids only had a couple.  The kids didn't seem to notice, but to make it fair for each kid, I would limit the number of rocks per kid so that they all end up with the same amount.  You can use the moms to enforce this by telling them that the kids are only allowed to have so many.

We've already had one mom volunteer to host Mommy and Me Book Club next month, so I can't wait to see what we are going to be doing!