Welcome one and all! TO THE SCHOLASTICS BOOK FAIR! Does that sentence make your heart skip at beat with nostalgia like it does for me? I don’t know what it was about this fair, but something about it felt truly magical the day it arrived at my school every year. So lets take a nice trip down memory lane and remember the good ol’ days at the Scholastic Book Fair!
10. Bringing Home Your Scholastics Catalog
Bringing one of these bad boys home gave you all the encouragement needed to make a dream wish list! And by dream wish list, we all know I really mean’t circling every item in the catalog. I tended to go a little overboard when it came to the Scholastics Book Fair. How could you not!? Even though I only ended up with about 10$ most in spending money, I still dreamed big!
9. Begging Your Parents For Spending Money
My parents always allowed me to go to the fair with a little pocket change. I cried the one year I forgot to ask them. But the 5-10$ given to me usually came with rules. Aka books ONLY. No trinkets or useless items. But did young elementary school me ever listen? NOPE. I came home every year with all the unnecessary erasers, highlighters, and bookmarks I wanted for all the books I didn’t buy!
8. You Got To Escape Class For A Little To Attend
Every grade and classroom usually had a set time to go down to the fair so it wouldn’t get too crowded at once. At least that’s how my school worked. We were also a very VERY tiny elementary school and our Library could not hold all of us at once. Anyways, this great system usually meant we got to skip class for a little to enjoy everything the fair had to offer! And by a little I mean like 15 minutes but hey that felt like an hour to young elementary school me!
7. Being Overwhelmed with Options!
The colors, the sights, the smells! It was all so overwhelming stepping through those library doors to see that beloved pop-up fair. It always smelled like plastic perfection and was overflowing with cardboard cutouts of your favorite book characters. Okay, maybe I’m embellishing my memories a bit, but seriously this fair was one of my favorite days at school. Seriously, each shelf was jam-packed with so many options that it was so hard for a young kiddo like myself with only 10$ to my name to make a decision!
6. The Nifty Eraser & Pen Selections
This is where I usually got lost and strayed away from that “only books” rule my parents gave me. The erasers were just so cool and basically like a new set of toys to keep hidden in your school desk! Plus you were one of the coolest kids in the class if you could keep notes or write with one of the wacky pens they had available. Given everything was severely overpriced, but my young mind never seemed to notice.
5. Can’t Forget Those Fancy Bookmarks
Another thing I loved to splurge on. How could I pass on the opportunity of buying a thin piece of cardboard with my favorite cartoon character on it? Or even better, one with a puppy! The best part of it all? I would usually buy bookmarks over books. The irony of it all.
4. Guinness Book Of World Records, I Spy & Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
Did anyone ever actually BUY one of these books at the fair? Because they always seemed to be the books that everyone grabbed off the shelf, spent their allotted 15 minutes flipping through to look at the pictures and oddities, then placed right back on the shelf when it was time to go. Don’t get me wrong they were popular, but not popular enough to own for yourself.
3. Books The Came With Toys Or Activities
Books with stickers, activity games, or mini stuffed animal versions of the characters to act out the story with? My eyes usually gravitated right towards whatever books had plastic covering on them because that usually meant they came with an additional item. But of course those items were usually severely overpriced like the erasers and were out of my budget range. Still fun to look at though.
2. The Activity Kits
Make your own crystals? Become an investigator and solve crimes like the pros? Starting your future career path at an early age was super convenient thanks to the expensive activity kits the fair had to offered! These were usually the hot items every kid BEGGED their parents to get for them. They were usually met with the typical “no you don’t need it” or the classic “we can get you something better at the store another time.” Parents knew the kit would be forgotten about and start collecting dust as soon as it arrived back home, but something about seeing them on display at that fair made EVERY kid want their own. Especially that one kid in the class whose parent would be generous enough to let them buy it.
1. The Classic Books
Junie B. Jones, Goosebumps, The Magic Treehouse, Captain Underpants, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid, Etc. The list goes on and on!
Toria's Tales 