Why Do Children's Books Move Fastest?

Children's books clear the network faster than any other category, because classrooms wear them out at a rate no budget keeps up with. A picture book gets read to pieces, literally, and then it needs replacing.

Board books do not age out. Kids do. The book your daughter demanded eleven nights running when she was three is not finished. It is just finished with her. Somewhere there is a three-year-old who has not heard it yet, and a classroom that would take it in a heartbeat.

The organizations requesting through the Give ME Books program skew heavily toward early literacy: Chicago Public Schools Title I classrooms, after-school tutoring programs, ESL classrooms where a picture book is doing double duty, shelters with a reading corner and not much else in it.

What Children's Books Does Give My Books Network Accept in Chicago?

Give My Books Network accepts every format of children's book, from board books to young adult novels, and they can all ride in the same box as the grown-up books.

• Board books, including the chewed corners
• Picture books and read-alouds
• Early readers and leveled readers
• Chapter books and middle-grade series
• Young adult novels
• Activity books, if the pages are mostly unmarked
• Children's audiobooks on disc and read-along sets

No need to separate anything by age range or format. Local Pick-Up Partners sort everything offsite after collection, which is their work rather than yours.

Are Scribbled, Chewed, or Sticky Books Still Usable?

Almost always, yes. Parents are far harder on their kids' books than any classroom would be, and normal wear does not retire a book.

A board book with teeth marks on the corner is fine. Marker on the endpaper is fine. A name written in careful five-year-old capitals across the title page is more than fine, and frankly that is half of them. Bent corners, a cracked spine, a sticker somebody applied with real commitment. All fine.

What does not work is the same short list as always. Mold, real water damage, pages torn out, or a book that has been living in a damp Humboldt Park basement long enough to have developed a personality. Nine times out of ten, the book a parent was embarrassed to include is exactly the one a classroom would have grabbed.

How Do I Pack Children's Books With Kids in the House?

Keep the boxes small and let your kids help choose. Board books are dense little bricks, and a box of them gets heavy faster than a box of paperbacks, so half-full is the right target.

You pack the books. The Local Pick-Up Partner does not bring boxes. Boxes or sturdy bags, well packed and not too heavy, is the whole rule.

Second piece of practical advice, from people who have watched this go sideways. If your kid is old enough to have an opinion, let them help. It goes better. A four-year-old who was told the books are going to other kids handles it well. A four-year-old who discovers an empty shelf does not.

How Do I Book a Chicago Service Day?

Enter your ZIP code and pick a day. If a Local Pick-Up Partner serves your ZIP, you can book immediately, and if nobody serves it yet, the request enters the out-of-area pickup system where nearby partners may claim it.

The window runs 8 AM to 8 PM and you do not need to be home. Which is fortunate, because if you have small children you are not home, you are at a birthday party in a park fieldhouse.

Set the boxes out in a safe, dry spot starting at 8 AM. In Avondale and Portage Park, that usually means the covered back porch or just inside the vestibule. Not the open stoop, if there is any snow in the forecast at all.

Where a Box of Chicago Picture Books Can End Up

Local Pick-Up Partners sort every collection offsite at their own workspace. Many items are redistributed to readers, schools, libraries, nonprofits, and organizations that request books through the Give ME Books program. Some are resold by the partner, which is what keeps the pickup free.

Items that cannot be reused may eventually be recycled as a last resort. We will not tell you your box lands in a particular classroom on a particular block, because nobody can honestly say that. What we can say is that children's books are the last thing to sit around waiting.

Early literacy is one of the places where a donated book does the most obvious good, and the Book Donation Programs guide from the American Library Association is a solid overview of how donated children's books get matched with the programs that need them.

Pack them up. Set them out. Give My Books Network takes it from the front step. Somebody's kid is waiting on the other end of it.