Friday, January 23, 2009

Operation Playtime-Day 4-Books

The theme today over at Operation Playtime is books. Books are not lacking in this house, and if you ask my husband, they may be my only vice.
Books have taken over around here. They are in the basement, closets,boxes, kitchen and in my mother's spare room in her upstairs. (See, I may have a problem.)
In the living room is a bookshelf with two shelves of books that the little kids pull out regularly. These I switch around occasionally. Of course, I also know about the library, and because these shelves don't provide enough reading material for the youngest people around here,
we go to the library several times a week. 7 of us have library cards, there is a thirty book limit, so we could have 210 books checked out at once. Usually our stack of books resembles the pile above.
Of course, if I take out the whole stack at once, I need to be ready to read aloud for an hour or so. Being homeschoolers, the kids are all used to listening to books being read aloud for a few hours a day. Whether for schoolwork or for fun-reading is always happening.
I looked back through old posts and found this, dated May 1,2007. It is the "books we read caterpillar" crawling along the top of our wall. This was for Mark and Grace, and is now gone. I have been wanting to make something similar for Luke and Kimberly, and this Operation Playtime theme made me get busy.
Luke's all time favorite thing is trains, so this is the logical choice for our new activity.
I found a train engine printable at my favorite site, DLTK . I then just free handed the two different train cars. I have now scanned them onto the computer in black and white to print out when needed. Grace helped to color the first four cars. I may color a few in different colors and save these on the computer for future printing because the kids will surely get tired coloring the same thing every few days.
Here goes our train, starting off on its journey. I may think of a reward for a certain number of books read, but for now Kim and Luke are young enough to just be happy adding new cars. I will tape the cars up on the wall once or twice a week, so our trains grows in impressive leaps and bounds.
ALL-ABOARD THE READING TRAIN!!
Make sure you go and check out other ideas at Operation Playtime-Books.

4 comments:

Nadja said...

I'm a book addict, too. I usually feel guilty about spending money, but not so much when the money is spent on books or art/craft supplies.

Anonymous said...

That's an impressive amount of books to keep track of. My poor dh took back a school library book with the county library books. So guess where he's going tomorrow......we only had 5 books checked out imagine if we had what you have. I love the train idea chugging around your room. Good idea to take a picture

ibeeeg said...

I am a book addict as well. I am really trying curb the purchasing and just using the library. Very hard.

Love your reading train and catapiller. I may do this with my little ones.

Rhonda said...

I love the train! Great idea!