Broken toys and ripped books are the norm in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. I used to throw all the “broken stuff” on my desk but it just added to the mess -and you know how important organization is to me!
Then I started using a box for damaged books and I called it a “Book Hospital”.
Book and Toy Hospital Box
The purpose of the box was to alert me to books that needed some TLC so I could fix them and put them back into circulation in our classroom library. The book hospital was a great idea but I quickly realized that it needed to be tweaked to make it work in my classroom.
The first thing I noticed about the Book Hospital was that most of the books the kids put there weren’t really damaged. I would flip through the books looking for ripped pages or broken bindings and couldn’t find anything wrong.
I would ask “Who put this book here? Why did you put it here?” and the child would flip to a page that had a tiny little wrinkle or mark almost invisible to the human eye. I guess reading all those books about books was a good investment!
I decided to re-read some of our favorite titles (RIP Mr. Wiggles – he’s out of print) and then we sorted through a pile of books together as a whole class, some damaged and some not. Finally we discussed the reasons why each book was damaged or not damaged and placed the truly damaged books in the Book Hospital- problem solved.
But that still left me with another problem {I know, I’m high maintenance!} what about all the other things in our classroom that were broken? On my desk I had a toy car with a missing wheel, a piece of fruit from the dramatic play center with teeth marks {never fails}, and a hole punch from the writing center that wouldn’t punch.
I needed to get all this stuff off my desk and I really didn’t have room for two boxes of broken stuff so I changed the “Book Hospital” to a hospital for all broken items. And we all lived happily ever after…
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