Back when I was a teacher, at my very first school we had a fabulous librarian. She’d been a librarian for several years, so she had all sorts of great ideas she’d instituted.
One of those was a shelf marker.
When the kids would go to look for books they’d grab a shelf marker, and put it in-between the two books before they pulled out the book they wanted to look at.
Then they would leave it there, while they looked through their book. If they wanted to keep the book, then they’d pull it out and move on. If not, they knew where their book would go back and could put it back in its correct spot.
As you can see, my kids were WILD for the idea!
Ours came from my most recent painting project. I asked the Home Depot guy if I could grab a handful of extra paint stirrers, and he had no problem with it. As I stirred the paint I slowly used each one, carefully dipping both ends in the paint, so both ends were painted. Now, I didn’t get all of them, but most of them are ready to be decorated by willing kiddos.
Great idea!
That’s what I thought when I first saw it!
As a librarian, I love that you took these with you to the library and showed the kids how they work! Great idea 🙂
I was thinking of you when I was writing it!
That’s funny! I had actually forgotten about this trick…I should make some paint sticks like this and leave them in our children’s area for kids to use.
I never heard of this idea before, but I see its brilliance, especially in self-made shelf markers.
It’s one of those things that once you see it, you just have to marvel at it’s brilliant simplicity. Or, I did.
This reminded me of the librarian in my elementary school, but then I think of her every time we step foot in the library and find the books all out of order.