Book Basket - The local library challenge

When we chose our 2nd grade curriculum this year, the thought of a book basket filled with wonderful books on our study topic sounded delightful.  That is, until we realized that our library is just not full of books on our topics.  Actually, it doesn't have many children's books at all.  Our librarian even told me that if I would make a copy of our book list, she would try to get them from our other county libraries.  That didn't work out.  She couldn't find anything.  She even looked by topic and not the actual book titles.  Anyway, we were checking out our maximum book number of FOUR from a neighboring county.  We have what is called a "gateway" card so our limit is four books.  Between TWO kids, that is NOT much.  Picture this, we had four books from that library, a handful from our local library, and then another handful from a neighboring town.  It was COMPLETE CHAOS in the making.  I felt like it was taking an entire day to gather up each book (even though the books are suppose to stay in the book basket), make separate piles depending on which library they go back to & then return them.

So, we agreed that once per week we would drive 30 miles to ANOTHER neighboring town in hopes of finding everything we need at that ONE library.  Ugh!

Therefore, what seemed like a GREAT idea, has turned into a real challenge.  However, I am still very happy with the curriculum that we have chosen.  One solution that I am finding to our dilemma has been finding used books on amazon, Paperbackswap.com (mostly successful but have received a couple of bad books as well), and I have now joined the Scholastic Book Club as a teacher in order to build up our school library as cost effectively as possible.  I have also found a great website Half Books, which is affiliated with ebay in which I have order MANY used books for a very low fee.  We ordered several from the same vendor so we were able to save a lot of money because the shipping price was reduced.  One suggestion that I have read on the MFW message board is to also print out articles on your study topic.  That is something that I hadn't thought to try.

It saddens me that living in a small town brings such disadvantages to our children.  I am completely aware that there are pros and cons to small town life, but seriously, it just seems so unfair that ALL libraries can't be up to par.  I hope that we are just a few that have this problem, but I am doubtful.  As you can clearly see here, we LOVE reading!