Spending Less Money On Books & Movies

My oldest girlie came home from school yesterday with a stack of Scholastic Reading Club Order Booklets. Four to be exact! While each purchase supports your child's school, I would rather save my money on books and make a donation to the school at a later time. 

Last year I got sucked into buying Scholastic books. It's great and all, but it was money I didn't need to spend. We regularly reserve books for myself and for my girls at our local library. The girls are excited to read new-to-them books and old favorites (like Fancy Nancy) that we borrow repeatedly.

When my daughter came home with this packet of order forms, my first thought was - CRAP! NOT AGAIN! And then I came up with a great idea! 

My daughter was so excited about all the books and I wanted to support her enthusiasm for reading. I told my daughter to circle all the books that she wants to read and that we could then borrow them from our local library. She was thrilled about going through all the pictures and circling her favorite books. 

Even better, I didn't have to limit her excitement to 1 or 2 books to keep the cost down. Her excitement about books could grow as much as she desired! 

In addition to the cost saving of utilizing our local library, I am also avoiding throwing the order forms in the trash by holding on to them for the next birthday present/christmas present and reusing these colorful papers as wrapping paper!

I love supporting our local library and the benefits we receive from utilizing their service. In addition to borrowing books, we've transitioned to borrowing movies for family movie night with the girls - this Friday we are going to watch Disney's Robin Hood for free.

When I went to the library to get our next batch of books and our Friday Night Movie, I started thinking about our movie collection. I went through a phase of buying movies for the girls every time I saw a good Disney Movie for sale. Now I have a stack of movies in my home. I decided, why not donate our movies to the library so that other kids can enjoy them as well. 

I knew getting my kiddos to agree with parting with all their movies at once was not going to go over well. So I had them each pick one movie to donate to the library. Next month I will ask them again to each pick a movie to donate, getting rid of our movie pile 3 at a time!

Movies donated to our local library!