Glamorous Garbage

Glamorous Garbage
by Barbara Johansen Newman
40 pages; ages 5-8
Boyds Mills Press, 2015

theme: cleaning up your bedroom; recycling, Earth Day

Bobbie and Joanie are cousins. Best cousins. You met them a couple years ago when Joanie needed glasses.

Now Bobbie has a problem. She loves to invite Joanie over to play in her bedroom, but Bobbie's bedroom is too messy! It's no fun to play there because toys get lost and there's no room to sit down.

So Mom lays down the law: "I'll give you two weeks to decide what stays and what goes. After that, I get to decide."

What I like: This is a subject we can all identify with: clutter. And the need to declutter. And dreaming about what your room could look like given a chance to do-over. Bobbie, though, starts collecting things for her "new" room before she even gets rid of all the junk on her floor and under her bed and spilling out of the closet. Finally she asks her mom for help and together they clean and paint and fix and finally.... Bobbie has space to create the room she wants.

Beyond the book: This book is perfect to read before Earth Day (which is next Wed). Why? 
Reuse. Bobbie and her mom strip and re-paint old furniture, making it "good as new". Bobbie also finds old barrels and crates that she "glams" up to use in her room.

Reduce. Cut the clutter, Bobbie's mom says. Use less. Or at least figure out what you really need to keep, and a good way to store it (whether it's sports equipment, shoes, or unfinished manuscripts...). Do you really need all your stuff? What do you have in your room that you can get rid of?

Recycle. One way to recycle is to figure out a new use for things. Like turning a box into a doll house, or making a stool by belting a stack of magazines together and putting a cushion on top. But there's only so many sock puppets and tin-can flower vases you can make, so sometimes you need to think of recycling outside the house. That's what Bobbie does. She holds a yard sale, but there are other ways of sharing old things that are still useable. What ways do people in your town use to recycle old furniture, tools, and other stuff?

 Today is PPBF (perfect picture book Friday) in which bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's site. She keeps an ever-growing list of Perfect Picture Books.  Review copy from the publisher.