Brainstormed+Activities+&+Procedures

A place to put all of the great ideas we've come across and want to "borrow"!
Short reading periods during the school day. Could these have elements of activity or discussion to help our more kinetic learners? [Sullivan. 2010. Serving Boys Through Readers' Advisory]

Book Bins around the school filled with books (ALL genres), comic books, magazines, etc. that have been donated from multiple sources (not library materials) -- thinking of Amelia's book closet here. The expectation would be that when a kid is done with one of these books, it is dropped in the bin or box for another student to read. There would be no expectation in reality that books would come back to the school.

**Fired Up for Reading -**- Bring in local fire department with the great trucks to the front of the school. With principal's permission, get all the kids outside and unload books for reading with the kids and firefighters. October is fire safety month, so it's a good time to start our program and build cross-organizational cooperation in the county. If we do this in 2nd and 4th quarter, end the program with the fire fighters again and distribute books to read over the summer.

Saw this today at a high school library observation: **BATTLE of the BOOKS** -- During the SSR implementation period, students compete as small teams or individuals to read off of a list of 10-12 books developed by the SLMS. Who can read the most? Read them all? Then participate at the end with the teams or as the indiv. in a SLMC-sponsored Battle of the Books "trivia" game show with buzzers and podiums, etc. to "verify" books have been read. Trivia questions move beyond AR quiz type (with simple recall) to reward deep reading and thinking. Costs: multiple copies of classic or excellent YA fict/non-fict (I saw Wintergirls, Speak, Going Bovine during my quick tour, but there seemed to be at least 20 sets of 4-8 copies). I really like this idea for middle or high school students. The fire trucks in the earlier suggestion seem elementary to me, but maybe I'm out of touch on this.

Use the school newspaper!! Have librarians interviewed by school newspaper staff several times during the year to provide information on the library's role in the SSR program and also to promote other programming events (Banned Books Week, etc.). Should consider ads for new books received or study hall activities or other library services to foment outreach in general. In watching students I've seen those information screens just become like visual white noise. School newspapers are still printed and passed around -- might give us more visibility in a real way. COST: negligible depending on whether or not we "assume" costs for ads in the school paper.

While at my public library today, I saw posters advertising "Lucky Book Week". This is a program which somehow marks a certain percentage of the juvenile collection as "lucky" and for each book found and read, the patron gets a prize. I was unable to speak with the librarian who developed and is conducting this program, so I do not know specifics about the program, but will attempt to contact the librarian via email to gain some more information. Maybe a lucky book system is something that the SLM can implement in the larger reading program as another method of encouraging those not necessarily reading quantity, but at least reading something. Ex. a student who has dyslexia or another learning disability might have a difficult time reading one book after another to acquire a prize based on number of pages read, but they might get "lucky" and find a book which has the lucky mark in it and could get a prize that way. Just a thought to level the playing field a bit. OOH, really like this, Elise.

**100 Million Words Campaign**--http://schools.clayton.k12.ga.us/019/Programs/1MillionWordsCampaign/tabid/3235/Default.aspx--as a jumping off point. Each child is supposed to read 25 books over the entire school year. Each book is about 40,000 words. Create a schedule to have a certain number of words read by a benchmark date. The bulk of reading should be done at home. Books should be easy and enjoyable to inspire a life-long love of reading. Very important that the books be purely for pleasure reading. Challenging books are not part of the equation.

Spoke with my cousins who are sophomores and seniors in high school last night; they came to the consensus that if they could choose the grand prize for our reading program, they would like a comedian first, musical act second and pro athlete third. I agree with the point that Tina (I think it was her) raised last night, that we need not specify who the grand prize would be for our project, but give suggestions of ideas for the grand prize.