Oh, my gosh! Book Fair!!

The Manila Book Fair is going on, so we went over to check it out. I'm not going to lie. It was pretty awesome.

It's going on at the conference center next to the Mall of Asia. I went in the off chance of finding a new English curriculum to replace the one that I brought with us that basically just repeated the previous level and was therefore pointless. Hrmph. I thought that finding actual curricula at the book fair would be a long shot, because I expected it to focus mainly on novels and non-fiction, but there was actually quite a bit to chose from! The fair was probably split 30/40/20 between religious books/text and educational books/novels and non-fiction. So odds were on my side and I went hunting!

The best deal I found though was in the Anvil Publishing booth. They have reprints of Prentice-Hall textbooks called LPEs (Lower Price Editions). They are basically the same text book you'd find in any classroom, only they are paperback and printed in black and white on cheaper paper. Since they will only have to be used and abused by two kids, I figured $5 a piece was a screamin' deal. I got the language arts books this year through 6th grade, but they have all the texts through high school level, and also carry the complete science lines through high school as well. Good to know! If we end up back in the States before the girls are done with school, I'm going to stock up before we go!

Scholastic also had a booth there, and I was able to get a handful of language and reading enrichment activity books for half-off the already marked down price. (Book fair + bargains = bliss!)

A handful of the booths were staffed by very eager, high-pressue sales staff, but for the most part, I was free to wander in and out of the booths and take my time. I'm really glad we were able to go. I have a feeling this will be a yearly tradition for us the whole time we are here. If I had had more time, I'd have started my Christmas shopping!

Perhaps the coolest thing that happened while we were there, though, was when we found a Mad Scientist in one of the booths, doing a presentation for kids. K and The Youngest joined in the fray and began participating. K is a bit of a science junky, so she kept answering questions and making contributions. Then, the demonstrator began talking about volcanos.

I shall pause to share that we JUST began talking about plate tectonics yesterday, and the first this we talked about was what happens when plates colide. As part of that, we covered how volcanos happen.

Well, K gave the guy a run down with The Youngest contributing as well, and I guess that just pushed the woman who was running the booth over the edge, because she started going on and on about how awesome they were and how she wished she had them to teach science to. When it was time to move on, she grabbed a couple of packs of pencils and gave one to each of them. I was off browsing at the time, and A was watching them, and he was super impressed that they'd been singled out like that. He told me about it and I was all psyched, too, and I turned to K and asked her if she'd gotten pencils for knowing so much about science and was all, "Oh... Yeah," like it's totally normal for people to give her freebies for being so awesome. I tell ya, K has 99 problems, but self-esteem ain't one of 'em!