Through a lucky connection with a BA newcomers' group on the Internet, we happened across a family with a 15-year-old son who has kept hundreds of his old books, and was happy to lend them to us.
After our park excursion, we headed over to their home to check out the books.
I had envisioned a collection of maybe 10-15 books to choose from, but they had boxes and boxes of books, including non-fiction and many chapterbooks, both individual and series like Magic Tree House and Goosebumps! The mom loaded me up with books, and said when we returned those, we could get more. Wow.
(While we were book shopping in their office upstairs, the boys played ping pong with the 15-year-old son in the garden -- they live in a house -- and Tats was being persuaded by the woman's husband to imbibe in some flambayed crocodile; he's a chef!)
Once home, the boys spent the better part of an hour organizing their new, temporary library, then quickly burried their noses in a book each, and were not heard from again until we called them repeatedly for dinner.
This is a great treasure for us: Grade 4 constitutes the onset of the "bulk" years; it's critical that kids really begin reading voraciously during this time in order to become better readers and writers in general (not to mention, we want to instill a love of reading in them). When we came to Argentina in Sept, I brought as many books as I could, but many of them are texts and picturebooks we are using in "school"... our pleasure reading library has been rather limited, as it's hard to find English Language books here (and when you do, they're outrageously expensive). I am therefore tremendously grateful to our benefactors who have so generously let us borrow their books for a few weeks/months.
We celebrate reading!