Children’s NonFiction and School Books

Strangely, though I hated school as an experience, I loved learning and reading and I loved my textbooks during elementary school as much as the library books I got to pick on my own. I could be found copying the art from readers, singing the tunes from music books at home and looking for everything else the author ever wrote in enrichment study stories. I didn’t write *in* my books and I rarely got those awesome Lisa Frank book covers but I kept my stuff clean and ready to turn over to the next kid and looked back with a little sadness when those volumes left my bookbag for the bag of some paste-eater that might draw on the outside of the pages and turn down the corners- gasp! However, my parents did see that in the days before Nickelodeon’s magazine, there was a market for kiddie mags just like the ‘rents Cosmo and Smithsonian and I lucked out pretty well in that department. My usual groan was that I went through the whole mag in a day and WTH was I supposed to read until next month??