Reuse: Spiffing up used board books for kids in need

Our elementary school service club met for the second time this week with a focus on cleaning up and giving new life to old board books for preschoolers. In conjunction with a local non-profit called the Children's Book Bank, our school kids collected over 2,000 books in a week's time for donation to the Book Bank project. Here's some sobering stats from their website:

• In middle income neighborhoods, there's a ratio of 13 books to every child (in our house it may be as high at 130 books/kid or even 1300/kid given how hard it is to fit them all on a bookshelf!!)
• In low income neighborhoods, the ratio is one book for every 300 kids

This tears my heart out. We talked about this with the kids -- how some kids right here in Portland don't have any books, and start school not knowing how to open a book, or to track left to right because they don't have any books in their home!

So with the help of the Children's Book Bank founder, a group of about 50 elementary school kids and parents cleaned and sorted our large stock of donated books to ready them for new homes. Book covers are gently cleaned with towels (or all the pages for board books). Bindings are repaired with packing tape or clear contact paper. Scribbles and inscriptions are erased or covered. When the books are all cleaned, they are bundled up and given to local children in Headstart programs.

After doing this project, we talked with the gathered kids about what it would be like to live in a home without books and impressed upon them the wonderful deed they had done in getting these books ready for new owners. I hope that in the midst of our school's Green Week celebrations they also remarked the emphasis (once again!) on Reuse in the Reduce/Reuse/Recycle hierarchy. And that we should take care of our things so that less repair work is needed when we hand them on to others. Of course, try explaining that to a teething toddler. I cringe to remember all the board books my oldest chewed on when she was teething. At least my kids are old enough to get it now. I know I would be a heck of a lot quicker to hand the kid a wooden teething toy if we were to do it all over again. (Which we won't. Because we're done having kids. Don't want to be starting any rumors or anything... I'll stop now.)