Book Fair Fun!

Our elementary school book fairs wrapped up last night, and they were all a big success! With the fairs set up in our libraries, students had the chance during their library rotations to check out the merchandise and make wish lists. Below are some students enjoying the book Press Here, a Goldfinch-nominated book for the year.

And students browsing the other items available:

And a special thanks to the book fair moms who created this awesome photo opportunity for our students! LOVE it!

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by the book fairs in our building! We appreciate your support of reading and literacy!

What's Your Favorite Halloween Story?

With Halloween coming soon, we thought we'd take a quick survey to find out what your favorite Halloween story book is.

The nominees are. . . (drumroll please!). . .

So, which is your favorite? Click on the poll at the top right corner of the blog, and on Nov. 1 we'll reveal the winner. In the meantime, you can visit Youth Literature's Picture Books for Halloween webpage to see other great Halloween picture books!

Celebrating Halloween with Owls!

One of the popular topics in the library is owls, and what better time to celebrate owls than Halloween!

If you're interested in nonfiction books about owls, you might find one of these in our libraries:

Or maybe you'd like a fiction story with owls? You might try one of these chapter books, like Hiaasen's Hoot or Lasky's Guardians of Ga'Hoole series.

Finally, to celebrate the holiday, you might want to take a look at a children's book--maybe one of our favorites, Owl Babies, by Waddell. You can even enjoy an animated version of the story!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Read-Alikes

With the release of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book still weeks away--Hard Luck comes out on November 5, 2013--here are some suggestions from Scholastic to keep you reading until then!

CLICK HERE to read the full article from Scholastic.

ICCA Online Connections & Activities

With all of the great Iowa Children's Choice Award nominees for the year (see post below), you might want to find out more about the stories or the authors. Here are a few online sites you may want to visit:

SPACEHEADZ, by Jon Scieszka

You can CLICK HERE to access the official website for the Spaceheadz series to see the latest on the the mission. :)


HERE LIES LINC, by Delia Ray

Want to know more about the real story behind the Black Angel in Here Lies Linc? You can CLICK HERE to find out more!


MY LIFE AS A BOOK, by Janet Tashijan

CLICK HERE to visit the official site for all of the My Life As A... books. You can even create your own vocabulary flashcards here!


WONDER STRUCK, by Brian Selznick

Visit Scholastic's official page for the book when you CLICK HERE. You can read an excerpt, watch a video, and take a virtual field trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

Iowa Children's Choice Award Nominees, 2013 - 2014

We're excited again to introduce the ICCA books to our students using a scavenger hunt activity! Students rotated through several stations to see if they could match a book teaser to a book title.

We also shared with them this great Prezi presentation about the ICCA nominees:


Starting in upcoming lessons, we'll read a nominee to our 3rd - 5th grade classes and work on a reading comprehension strategies booklet, and then in March we'll vote for our choice. Stay tuned for our decisions!

We Hosted a Book Tasting!

After seeing several book tastings on Pinterest, we decided to give it a try! We'd been wanting to showcase different genres with kids, and this seemed like a good approach. Since mysteries and graphic  novels are also popular with our kids, we added those to our book tasting as well.

We found red-and-white checked plates and put paper on the tables to look like tablecloths. Then we pulled several books in the different genres/categories we wanted to feature: realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, and graphic novels.

You can grab the genre bookmarks from HERE.

Next, we created a "menu" that kids would fill out at they listened to book talks and watched book trailers. (While we liked this version before starting the tasting, we decided we needed a simpler approach and are already thinking about how to revise it for future book tastings.)

Click HERE for source information

During the book tasting, we talked about the different genres, book talked some examples, and featured a book trailer or two. All of this we put into a Google presentation to make the lesson run more smoothly:

Students had time to browse the books at their tables after the book talks and trailers to write down titles that interested them, and we'll keep their sheets so they can refer back to them when they're looking for a book during check out.