Learning Aid: Scholastic Book Club

There are days when the children come out of school with a thin booklet in their hands. It's the Scholastic Book Club booklet — and honestly, I look forward to it more than they do.

Scholastic Book Club is a book-ordering programme run by Scholastic, one of the largest children's publishers, in partnership with schools. When a parent orders books from the catalogue under their child's name, 15% of the order value is credited back to the school as Scholastic Rewards. The school uses these rewards to buy books and classroom resources, and when you place an order you can see both how much this order has contributed and how much has been saved in total so far. In a way, you're buying books at a low price while donating towards the cost of your child's school life.

When the catalogue comes home, the girls go straight to it — checking whether there's a new release in a favourite series, or a pretty little item or an interesting-looking board game, and circling what they like. It doesn't mean we buy all of it, but the looking seems to be half the fun. We mostly order when a series the girls already love, or a book I'd spotted at a bookshop, turns up in the catalogue at a discount.

You don't actually need the catalogue to order — you can browse and buy the current issue online. One thing to watch: you need to go to the Book Club site to sign up, not Scholastic's main site. I still remember poking around the main Scholastic website at first, wondering where on earth I was meant to register my child. The official Book Club site is bookclub.scholastic.co.nz. You create an account and register your child there. When you select your child's school, the year-level classes and teachers' names come up, and you choose your child's correct class, enter their name, and register. If you order before the issue closes, the books are delivered to the school once the whole school's order has been collated, and then sorted into the classrooms.

The biggest draw of Scholastic Book Club is the high discount. Books are dear in New Zealand, so even when we pop into a bookshop like Whitcoulls, we don't tend to walk out with an armful. But when a book I'd had my eye on shows up in the Book Club, that's when I buy it at a discount — the curation changes each issue, and some books are up to 50% off, so when a good book comes with a big discount, I order it straight away. As you'll see in the order list below, this issue we picked up Raina Telgemeier's Sisters at half price, and Megan Wagner Lloyd's Squished at 77% off.
Even setting the low prices aside, the Book Club selects and introduces books that are popular by age group and worth a child's while — which makes it a good curation tool for immigrant parents who don't know English-language books well. You get a sense of what children here tend to read, which books a child of your own's age and English level might take an interest in, and you can note down the authors who come up often to refer to later at the library or when buying books. That's quite a valuable thing to have.

One drawback is that, because delivery only begins school by school after the whole issue's orders are wrapped up, ordering early in the cycle means waiting a good while for the books to arrive. The delivery date isn't clearly announced, so in our house I have everything sent under my youngest's name, so I can pick it up on my way to collect her.

What the children brought home the other day was the Issue 3 catalogue, but by the time I went to order a few days later it had already changed to Issue 4 — so I browsed the new catalogue online and ordered from there. It'll be a good while before they arrive, but I can already picture the girls' faces lighting up at the new collection.