Last year we had a great year in our LLC with fostering reading culture! We had our first book club, and we launched Battle of the Books for high school students in our district. So much fun!
This year… it’s a bit like the air has gone out of the tires. Not many students have shown up for either the book club or BoB. However, I remain undaunted. Just have to change my strategy and visit the classes. Frankly, this is the part I love anyway. I’d much rather make connections with students by heading out to their classes, than by waiting for them to wander in. Plus, I really love the collection of books we’ve put together for out BoB competition. Check out our website for the list (we’re only doing grades 8-10 this year, and hopefully adding 11-12 next year). In the end, this was a great, and valuable experience for our students and it will continue to be, especially since our school (unwisely in my thinking) got rid of school wide silent reading several years ago. Now it falls on the English Dept, so I’m working to help bring reading out across the school.
Another classic, it DEAR. I love it, and teacher’s like it when they remember that it’s happening. I try to be a problem solver, and so when teachers protested that they couldn’t participate because they didn’t have the time to bring students to the library, I started putting together shoeboxes full of books specifically targeting their students. It has been a great success! We have way more participation, and students (and teachers) have found some gems they didn’t we had. 
My library partner came across this video for DEAR by Parkland Learning Commons (Yes, our very own instructor!), and we are absolutely excited about making our own video. They used zombies; we’re thinking handmaids! Great literacy tie in on so many levels!
The last item I want to try more of this year is buying and adding audio books to our collection via Destiny. A couple of schools in our district and our district library do this, so I have some people I can call on (YAY!). The timing for this was fortuitous. We had our first technology committee meeting and one of the LAC teachers brought up the fact that their ipads were getting old and they were worried about losing the audio books that they had purchased. I mentioned that I wanted to start putting them on our Destiny page for all students to access, and now we’re excited to get going with this experiment! Hopefully this will be one more great reason to help get our students using our resources more often!
Some great ideas for keeping the energy up and involvement high. I am so glad you found my video! It was super fun to make and its provided a lot of mileage. I am looking forward to seeing your Handmaid’s video when it comes out. I appreciated your discussion of being the support your colleagues need, as they can be very busy and overwhelmed, and sometimes, all they need is for us to go to them and make it as easy as possible. Your enthusiasm, examples and suggestions all help to provide others with some great ideas for fostering reading cultures!
I love that your enthusiasm jumps from your post! Thank you for sharing some great initiatives such as a mobile book cart and your Battle of the Books website. From your post, I have more questions than comments:
1) How did you create the site for your Battle of the Books and was it quite easy to build? I love the look of it!
2) I am finding there is a great demand for audiobooks these days with IEP’s – I cannot keep up. How are you finding them in relation to Destiny? We are in talks of testing other library catalogs. I can see the shortcomings of Destiny, but wondered how it has worked for you and the audiobook collection. One of the problematic areas is reserving a copy of a book for one student for several weeks during a full term novel study. I have heard Audible come up several times in the last few days but I don’t know much about its cost, availability of titles, and ease of use.
I wish I could take credit for the Battle of the Books website, but one of our district library staff, the Amazing Craig!, updates the website for all the different levels of Battle.
As for the audio books with Destiny, I haven’t had too much of a chance to check it out, but since our district uses Destiny already, it’s an easy fit. I’ve used Audible before, but it gets expensive and it’s hard to share. With Destiny, whatever I have at my library, or whatever our district library puts on, is accessible by all of the staff and students at my school. I’m not sure if I’m limited only to what is available in the Follet catalogue (which I suspect is the case), but hopefully I’ll get to explore more of it next week. With the problem of reserving the copy for one student, I wonder if audiobooks can be treated like textbooks with Destiny. That would change their availability and deadlines. I’d probably buy two copies in this case so that one is a library material and one is a textbook. Hmmm… I’ll post any other ideas I get from my district librarian.
I LOVE the idea of Battle of the Books. I also love the idea that you are actually going into the classroom to promote things-why not?!? That never occurred to me! Awesome. I will definitely be asking you questions at some point about this BOB! I am also curious how DEAR ends up going long term. Thanks for the ideas!
Now that we’ve got the shoebox of books, I think that teachers are more willing to participate. It’s definitely helped, and we try to put in all different kinds of materials: graphic novels, magazines, non-fiction, fiction. We want to aim for the class’s reading level and interests, but also expand them. So far so good! Plus our district hands out a prize to the school that wins the participation draw, so that helps.