This Flashback Friday is brought to you by YA lit and my life as a fourth-grade nothing.
Did your school do the Scholastic Book Club? If not, you really missed out. Here’s how it worked. Your teacher would pass out order forms and, if you were really good, she’d let you take a whole 20 minutes of class time to pore over it and pick out the books you wanted. I myself went through books like the Real Housewives go through collagen and Botox, so by the end of that 20-minute period I would easily have three quarters of the books on it circled. Really Important items on my wish list were ranked with one, two, or three stars.
Then you’d stuff the order form in your Trapper Keeper to bring home to your parents, who would make you pare it down some. Not to discourage something awesome like reading, but rather to avoid bankruptcy. The great thing about the Scholastic Book Club is that you could get awesome book sets and other accessories and extras, and if I’d gotten my way, my parents could have easily dropped $100 every time I brought home that order form. Once you and your parents came to an agreement, you’d return to school with the order form and a check.
And then came the best part: BOOK DAY! Three weeks later, just long enough for you to move beyond the impatient stage to the point where you’d almost forgotten about the books altogether, your teacher would come out with bundles of books that would make your backpack lumpy and heavy. But you didn’t care, because you had a complete boxed set of the Narnia books and the latest Babysitters Club book.
All this reminiscing made me wonder if they still have Scholastic Book Club in schools, and thankfully they do, because it’s a great program for encouraging literacy and earning free books for the classroom. Thankfully for teachers and parents alike, they’ve entered the 21st century and made it possible to order and pay online, because I’ll bet those order forms were a bitch to fill out.
Share your Scholastic Book Club memories in the comments!
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