Welcome to another installment of Thrifty Thursday, where I share my latest thrift store finds and how we use them in our homeschool day! The thrift store will always be one of my favorite place to find homeschool materials. There are so many educational toys and games dropped off. It’s sad that more kids don’t play with these toys but we will gladly give them a good home!

If you read the how and why we started homeschooling I posted a few months ago, you might recall me saying that we would go to the library every week as a family. At our local library there are a set of books (My First Steps to Reading by Jane Belk Monucure) I LOVED. I thought they were a great way to teach letter recognition and letter sound. I would always grab what letter we were on that week if it was available, which wasn’t always the case. I felt sad when the letter we were on was unavailable. I started to get them a few weeks in advance. I briefly considered ordering the set of books for myself, but never looked into it and before I knew it my son was reading, so we just stopped using the books.

The thing I love about the books is just how simple they are. Each book has a character (little a, little b…) and in each book that character fills a box with things that start with that letter. They continue their journey throughout the book filling their box with things as they go.

Now that our baby is entering toddlerhood, I’d like to start “schooling” him the same way. However, bringing the family to the library every week isn’t as easy as it once was. It’s amazing how just adding one more child makes everything so much harder. I’ve heard that there is a BIG difference between having one and having two children, but there isn’t a huge difference between having two and three children. I wonder if that’s true?

Because we are not going to the library as frequently as we once did, I was SOOOO excited to find the SAME set of books! The covers are different so I didn’t even recognize them right away. The ones in the library are older and look a bit nicer. When I saw this big set of books at the thrift store I had to take a look. When I saw what they were, I knew we were going to buy them! At $0.59 a book they were totally worth it! However, there were two missing from the set. I wish they were complete but at that price you can’t really complain!

Can’t thrift it but gotta have it? Here is an affiliate link for your convenience.

My First Steps to Reading Complete Set