One thing that I wanted to do this year to promote reading over the summer was to hold a book fair at the end of the year. I had my annual book fair back in the fall, so I wanted to take this opportunity to try something different. The librarians at our high school have been using a local independent book store for several years now to host their book fair, so I was excited to finally give them a try!

I was blown away by this AWESOME book fair hosted by Cavalier House Books! I’m telling you, this was the BEST book fair I have ever seen!! The folks at Cavalier House Books make this fair a dream — they set up and tear down the fair! AND they have someone there during the entire fair to do all of the actual book selling! I had such a great time spending the week with John Cavalier, who is so obviously passionate about what he does and full of awesome ideas to keep growing his business. He was great interacting with the kids, looking up books they were interested, and making orders on things he didn’t currently have available to bring in from the store. No lame restock orders that never come in time or come in partially full here, baby!

The selection that was made available to my students at this fair absolutely blew us all away. So many students and teachers walked in and IMMEDIATELY commented on how much better this fair was than any we’ve had in the past. There were books available for every type of reader, something to get everyone excited!

I cannot say enough good things about our CHB Book Fair! I am now a loyal customer for life and look forward to some of the great things that can come from building a relationship with such an awesome local indie book store! And check out these pictures of the fair…they will speak for themselves!

You’re jealous, right? 🙂

We had so much fun with our January & February Book Challenge, that we’re having another one!

First, my reflection on the January & February Challenge. I was blown away by how intensely some of our students got into reading for this challenge. There were a total of 15 tasks in the challenge for a total of 15 books, and we had 5 students complete the entire thing and a number of other students come very close! About 40 students turned in their logs to me at the end of the challenge, but I know more participated. We had a total of 39 join the group on Schoology.

I could have done a better job in a few areas. First, I should have made more announcements/reminders to keep pushing students along. The ones who did participate were very much self-motivated. I didn’t even post the updates on Schoology as regularly as I should have. I’ll definitely be better about this next round. I also planned to do some type of leader board. That didn’t happen at all. The points and such were too difficult to keep up with and organize on a larger scale.

I’ve had questions from my blog and Twitter followers about a few things. First, I said I was going to do prizes. I ended up nixing the prizes. I’m not much of a prize person because I want them to be intrinsically motivated, and these kids really were. Instead, I opted to do an “event” at the end of the challenge. We had nachos, discussions, and activities including make your own bookmark. Once again, my communication skills were a bit lacking (and I had to reschedule it). I only had 7 students show up for the after school event, but we had SO MUCH FUN that it was completely and totally worth it. I have no doubt that I’ll have more show up next time. And they felt that the event was plenty enough “reward” for them.

I also had the question of how I was going to verify if they actually read the books or not. This is another reason I went away from the original idea of prizes. I wanted this to be completely on the honors system (with a little help/monitoring from their ELA teachers).  For the most part, I think the students were pretty honest about what they read. Like I said earlier, the students who truly participated in this were self-motivated and pushing themselves to read more. And WOW, did they ever!

SO, I’m very excited that today was the start of the Spring Book Challenge!

Spring Book Challenge by librariantiff

After getting feedback and seeing how things went, I made a few changes. First, I did away with the “points” for different categories. I also went from 15 tasks to 10 tasks. And we cut down the time frame from two months to one month. Some students felt overwhelmed by the length of the first challenge, so this one is pared down a bit.

I’m excited to get this new challenge started! And I love the graphic I created! And I love the 10 tasks! Yay! So, as always, feel free to take this and make it your own! I’m excited to share something that my students and I are enjoying so much.