When I first began this library journey, I noted that many of the veteran librarians offered Five In A Row books to their patrons – usually as an add-on service. I have known about Five In A Row for a while, especially since falling in love with Purple House Press many years ago. When I began to look into acquiring the necessary books to offer FIAR to my patrons I was overwhelmed.

I think the FIAR program is beautiful. If I were the mother of a youngling, I would absolutely buy a copy of the plan and source the books from a combination of used book sites and interlibrary loan. But, as a librarian, I knew that even if I could get my hands on all of the books, they would be so hard-gotten that I would not want to lock them into a program where they couldn’t be read by as many patrons as possible. I simply did not have enough of the books to make the project accessible, but I loved the idea and it stuck with me.

Enter: Picture Book Preschool. Different, but similar, Picture Book Preschool felt a whole lot more accessible to me. And investing in it, didn’t preclude me from also chasing down FIAR books one or two at time.

Picture Book Preschool is a lovely book list with about 400 great picture books organized into weekly themes. Each week has seven books and maybe a bonus one or two. (And, Sherry Early is in the process of massively updating PBP with more books – coming soon!) The trick has been to figure out how to adapt it into library use. If you have a small library with only one or two patrons using PBP, you can probably use it just as it is written. I, however, have twelve (and counting) families committed to using it. Fifty-two weeks, divided by twelve families, with thirty-day checkouts was a bit tricky to organize. I did a test run this spring and learned some things. I will take you on my journey and show how we have it set up for the upcoming school year.

You can learn more about (and purchase) PBP here. If you purchase it now, do not worry about missing out on the updates. Just reach out to us once the updated version is released and Sherry will send the new copy along to you.

Finding The Books

Unlike closed programs like Five In A Row, I have found PBP to be more flexible. Using Sherry’s list and her themes, I shopped my shelves. I worked towards the objective of having seven to ten picture books for each theme. I owned about 30% of the books already. I acquired many many more. And I am using substitutions for the rest. As I come across more PBP books, I will continue to update my program.

Organizing The Books

Because of the scale with which I am doing this, I removed all the books from circulation and checked them out to myself. (I created a patron in my LibraryThing account for PBP and checked them out to that patron.) Then, I created a book record for each of the weeks in PBP. I even made graphics for each week to use as the book cover. You can download for your own use, here. In my description of those weeks, I listed each of the books I have in that bundle. Now, when a patron is ready for a particular week, I can check out the bundle to them.

Storing The Books

This is a tricky bit. I need to contain all of the books in a given week. I need to send them out as a bundle. They need to live somewhere in my library at the ready. And they need to live in my patrons’ homes in something usable and organized. This is far from a perfect solution, but I chose to bundle each week into a zippered pouch. Those week pouches (and a coordinated laminated book list for each) live in a dedicated set of Kallax shelves. At any time 50% of the weeks are checked out, so I only need about seven or eight Kallax cubes to store the rest. Next, I required each patron to pay a $10 material fee. Included in that fee is a Picture Book Preschool tote that will hold their zippered pouches when they are checked out. I know these pouches are flimsy and the zippers are so breakable. But that material fee allows me to replace them as necessary. Although, even with broken zippers, they still do a decent job of containing books on shelves and in totes.

Managing The Weeks

The trouble with the weeks and months: Because I have so many families using PBP and I live a minimum of twenty minutes away from my patrons (most live about forty minutes away), I needed for them to be able to check out several weeks worth at a time. And, I couldn’t have any seasonally specific weeks because, who gets those and who has to miss out? So, I eliminated Thanksgiving and Christmas. Because I love the themes and wanted to build off of them while also giving my patrons more units in circulation, I added a few themes. I replaced Thanksgiving with Libraries and I replaced Christmas with Birds. I also added Farm Animals, Pond and Field, and U.S.A. I plan to add a few more as well. Again, the magic of shopping your shelves.

Resources

Purchase your own copy of Picture Book Preschool here
Download the covers that I made for LibraryThing and my book list cards
Download the checklist that I made for each patron
Download the stickers that I made for each unit
Here is the explanation I shared with my patrons on my website