We don't have a collection of particularly Seasonal books, but I decided that just cycling through all the books would still have value. A few plastic tubs and some sorting later, and I had a bunch of piles of books on the floor. Then I decided that some of the books were really Carbon's, and some of them were really Hypatia's, and they would enjoy their books more if they were housed in their bedrooms.
Instead of one big shelf of books, we now have just a few books in a bunch of different places around the house, with some of them in storage out in the garage. Isn't this counter-intuitive? Don't I want to surround my kids with books?
Well, we cannot focus on anything when we are overwhelmed, and once again that has been shown to be true here. By giving the kids fewer books to have to sort through before they can find one to look at, I'm seeing them spending more time with their books and enjoying them a lot more.
Less is so often more. And stirring things up usually leads to more enjoyment of our space.
And now I have a system that will be beautiful as we start to collect some seasonal books!
My children love the weird states series. They started with Weird NY, then requested the surrounding states from the library. They have those same abridged classics too. I find too that my children respond to books if I put them where they can find them, where they're reminded that this particular book or two is readable, but my children also enjoy browsing through all the possibilities, enjoy the idea that there are undiscovered books hidden in Mama's voluminous shelves. Plus, if their library is at home, I don't have to worry about miles of junk twaddle filling out the spaces between the books I'd like my kids to read.
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