FPT (Front Porch Therapy): Dewey Decimal System

I have to create a whole new schedule for my Wednesdays. I used to take Miss Violet to the library for storytime in the morning, we'd come home, eat lunch, take a nap, go to school to work on kindergarten penmanship, bring all the girls home for homework, dinner, and then off again for KICK (their youth group through church). Last week was the last week until fall for both storytime and KICK.

What I thought I might try is taking all of the girls to the library at the time we would normally go for KICK. This is a huge undertaking because when my girls are all together in a place where quiet is the norm...it doesn't last long. But, if I don't try, I will never know how much they have grown. We had a friend over for a playdate as well, so it was a huge experiment that if it worked would be fantastic.

I packed my bag with colored pencils, regular pencils, sheets of paper, a sand timer, and dice. We didn't use the timer this trip but maybe next time.

The girls looked around for a bit and found some story books and movies. Then they were ready to play my game. They each took a piece of paper and a pencil and some dice (I had many different dice with many different sidedness.) I told them that they needed to roll the dice and get three numbers. Then they needed to take those numbers over to the bookshelves, read the labels at the ends of the aisles, and then read the book labels to find the number they rolled.

For instance: Miss Hazel rolled a 5 and a 2 and a 2. We went searching. We found

She was very excited about that and kept racing to find more. Her friend on the other hand rolled a 5 and a 6 and a 7. She found

She wasn't as excited about the game as Miss Hazel was.

The girls found some interesting books. We should have an interesting week of reading. They did get a little bummed out when they didn't find their number in the stacks. I had to explain to them that they just needed to keep rolling because sometimes the library didn't carry the book on that subject. I had to pull them away they were having so much fun. Here's a few of the books they found...

#650

#242

#565

#933

#232

#811

#944

#296

Looking at these titles, I'm not sure that we'll be doing this every week. Unless we return the ones we found the week previous and got a whole new batch. I'm afraid the girls will find some really great every time we go and we'll end up with a miniature version of the public library stored at my house (not that they don't have their own library in their playroom).

I just thought it was so great getting them comfortable at the library. Showing them the abundance of information that is accessible to them. My girls LOVE learning. Especially if I can put playing in the mix as well.

I used to play this game with my hubby for our date nights. Now we're part of The Mental Fitness Challenge and a Sunday school class based on

and he's also trying to finish reading

. His brain can only take so much information at a time.

Feel free to take this idea and run with it. It helps to have a 12 sided dice so that you can get into the higher numbers.