April: National Library Week!

It's finally here! National Library Week! I am so excited for what we have planned during National Library Week. I wanted to share our ideas with all of you!

First we have our April checkout raffle. Anyone who checks out a book during the month of April is entered in a raffle to win a $25 iTunes gift card. The more checkouts you have the more entries you get. We do not actually write down student names or make them sign a sheet or anything. At the end of the month I will run a report on Destiny for who checked out books and then we will do a random pick.


Second: Post-it Note Art, I already wrote up a post about our post-it note art contest. The first three students to guess the design win cute prizes related to the images they are creating. You can find out more here: http://librarianondisplay.blogspot.com/2014/04/crafts-post-it-note-art.html

Third: Share 2 or more of your favorite books that you have read and loved and get a healthy snack! We are asking students to tell us what their favorite books are. These can be books we already have in the library or books we don't have. We will be turning this into a display the first week of May. Here is the signage and signout sheet:

Fourth: Recommend a book and get a healthy snack! Every year we do  recommend a book  for National Library Week. The student has to recommend a book that the library does not already have (and that is appropriate). They then get a healthy snack. We will then purchase pretty much every book that is recommended, as long as it is YA and appropriate (no elementary level books or Fifty Shades of Grey). The first week of May we do a display where we feature the books and put the student who recommended it's name on the book. Here is the signage and signout sheet:

Fifth: Create a bookmark for the library. Students can design up to three bookmarks for the library. We provide bookmarks to students when they check out a book. The library picks one winner and they will have their bookmark be featured in the library for a year. The winner gets a $25 Amazon gift card. Here is the signage and template:

Sixth: Free Books! Every year we save books that have been weeded or are duplicates. Maybe they were donated and we already had them.... Whatever the reason we have books to give away to the kids. We place them on a cart with a free books sign and let them go wild!:

Besides these six events we also have our interactive displays: Book Spine Poetry and Quotes, Quotes, Quotes. It is a great week to be in the library! Please feel free to use any of the signage or ideas. (The bookmark sign has our library name on it but you could easily replace that in Paint with your own image).

Crafts: Post-it Note Art

Post-it note art is something I have wanted to try for the past year. Ever since I first came across pictures of offices and libraries with post-it note art on their walls I thought it would make a wonderful project for our library. This year we decided to incorporate Post-it note art into National Library Week. There are several images available online that are basically ready to go. These images are mostly of old school video games like Mario Brothers and PacMan. Although they are really cool looking, I wanted images that related to the library. I was unable to find these ready made, so I created them myself.

I decided to make Harry Potter, Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) and Ironman (we have Ironman comic books). I didn't want to give the students the full design, it seemed too easy and they would be finished too quickly. Instead I separated the image into 10 images. This way ten students or ten teams of students could participate. Each team would just put up the colors that their image shows and the design will slowly be built as more and more colors get put up. We decided to give out prizes to the student who guessed what characters they were creating before the design was complete.

I made a grid on a large sheet of butcher paper. The grid is 3' high by 5.5' wide. I then drew in 3" x 3" squares (the Post-its we are using are the 3" x 3" kind). However, you could use the images below and go with a 2" x 2" post-it, just adjust your grid accordingly. I purchased all the post-its at Office Depot. I did have to manipulate the colors from the original colors of the images. You will see in the images provided that they show the post-it color not the original color so the students wouldn't get confused. (Light grey became light blue, royal blue became blue, Brown became orange, peach became pink) I was unable to find black post-it notes so I ended up just cutting out 3" x 3" squares from black construction paper  (black seemed too important to the design to replace with an alternative color).



Here are the 10 images:

 The Post-it Note art project was such a big hit that I put a second grid up. I didn't have time to create brand new images as I did above but if you search online you can find some old school video games like PacMan and Mario. I then brought the images into Photoshop and tweaked them to fit my grid and to make sure that there were no post-it's that needed to be cut like in the first images.I then just hung the photos up above the grid and handed the students stacks of post-its.

Please feel free to use the images to create your own post-it note art!