April: Raining Cats and Dogs Display

It's raining cats and dogs at the library! Our new April display showcases books with either cats or dogs on the cover. For the decor I use the Silhouette Cameo to cut out umbrellas and raindrops, for the raindrops I used blue glitter paper.

At the very bottom of the display I added a puddle (waves) in blue glitter and then some upside down umbrellas.



Here are all the files, you can use them with the Silhouette Cameo, just use the trace feature.

December: Star of Wonder, Star of Night Display

This year for one of our winter themed display I chose to do a star theme. I called the display "Star of Wonder, Star of Night." This display was one of my first attempts at using our new Silhouette Cameo machine that was recently donated by a library parent volunteer. The Silhouette is amazing and I can create all kinds of projects. For this display I drew up two designs in Illustrator and then brought them into Photoshop where I saved them as .pngs. We did not do the software upgrade to the Designer software on the Silhouette, but I have learned some easy work arounds to create basically any design I want in the Silhouette Studio.

For those of you who have a Silhouette or other paper cutting machine, here are the two png images, please feel free to use them:

If you bring them into the Silhouette Studio you can use the select trace area and then uncheck high pass filter to make this a cut file.

For the books on display I chose every book that we had with star, shine, night.... in the title.

For the rest of the decor I found star images on Pinterest and made them into cut files. I also made some 3D stars from old book pages using a tutorial I found on House Revivals

That's about all there is to it!

October: Halloween Slime Display

It's Halloween time and the library has some awesome displays this year! Our first display is covered in slime! I got this idea from Pinterest, it was easy to make and looks great in person.

I started off by getting a stack of lime green paper. I cut out five different variations of slime and then used those as templates to cut out approx 40 pieces of slime.

For the top three shelves I taped the slime of the inside top of the bookcase along with the outside edge. The bottom four shelves you couldn't see the inside well so I only did the outside.

I made a sign for the display saying "It came from the library." and I made a second sign for our website.

September: Banned Books Week (Display 3) Banned Books

For the last Banned Books display I decided to make paper chains with locks. One of our Student Library Assistants cut out several strips of black construction paper and stapled them together to form long paper chains. I drew locks onto construction paper and cut them out and then taped them onto the chains.

I also made up caution signs in Photoshop and cut them out and placed them on some of the books.

I saw several displays on Pinterest that were using the ALA's Forbidden graphic on their books. I liked how it looked so I printed out several and pasted them onto the books as well.

I made up a sign for the display using the ALA graphics for this year's Banned Books Week:

I printed out three images using quotes and pictures I found on Buzzfeeds "11 Quotes from Authors on Censorship and Banned Books" 

For the top of the bookcase I made a Banned Books sign using ALA graphics:

September: Banned Books Week (Display 2) Books Under Fire

Our second Banned Books display was inspired by several displays I have seen on pinterest using "fire." I called it "Books Under Fire."

I started by creating a resource list in Destiny of as many banned books as I could find in our OPAC. I needed as many hardback books as possible because of the decor I was putting on the books. One of our parent volunteers then took the list and pulled several books. I picked 24 hardback books and began research each one to find a summary of when it was banned or challenged and a year. I made a template in Photoshop for banned books and one for challenged books. Depending on which option fit I would paste in the summary for that book.

I printed all the banned books onto yellow paper and all the challenged books onto dark peach paper (I was trying to stick to the colors of fire). I then cut the paper down to fit each book and covered the entire right side of each cover.

For the fire I googled fire clip art and enlarged two images to use as templates. I cut the fire out of red, orange and yellow construction paper.

I made a sign for the top of the display using fire graphics.

September: Facebook Display

It is the start of a new school year and new displays! I found an awesome interactive Facebook themed display on pinterest from The Punny Librarian and since the Library has a dedicated Facebook page I thought this was a great idea to begin the new school year.

Students were encouraged to "Like" their favorite books by taking a "Like" bookmark, provided on the display, and placing it in their favorite books on the shelves in the stacks. In the top left corner of the display I put a sign explaining the interactive aspect of the display. My sign is only about 8", which is all the room I had, in the Punny Librarian's Display she created a very large sign, which would have been great if I had the space.

I then made several signs using Facebook logos and icons that I found on google and placed them all over the display.

I created the bookmarks by putting the "like" thumbs up on the top of the bookmark and then the word "Like" below it. Below that I told the students to like our Facebook page and provided the link. To hold the bookmarks I made a small sign and folded in the sides and base and taped it to the display:

July: Summer Reading Had Me A Blast Display

 

Check out my new summer display "Summer Reading Had Me A Blast." Sticking with the "Grease" theme I created a Grease type logo using a red car and instead of the words "grease" I used "read."

  In our collection we have two books that have records on the cover: Telegraph Avenue and Half-Blood. I used the cover images to make two two records and I printed out a few copies of each to put around the display. I then created music notes in Photoshop and cut them out to put on the display.

I found a "grease" type font and wrote the display name and then cut out the words and put them onto red construction paper.

A very easy display, but it turned out great!Feel free to use any of the signage/pics.

May: Student Recommended and Favorite Books

Back in April, during National Library Week, we had students write down their favorite books and also recommend books the library did not already own. Every May we then create a display (or displays) that feature all of these books.

To begin we took the lists of books students had recommended and listed as favorites. You might remember the sheets I created for National Library Week:

I then searched our catalog for all the books. If we had them I added those books to a resource list. The books we did not already own I added to a wishlist on Amazon. After I checked that the books were appropriate I ordered them and our wonderful parent volunteers cataloged the books once they came in.

The second step was to type up labels for each book that was recommended. The labels have the name of the student who recommended the book along with a sentence "This book was suggested by.....". I then printed up all the labels and stuck them on light green post-it notes that I trimmed down (not really necessary but easier to remove from the books once the display comes down).

One of our Library Student Assistants came up with the decor idea. She suggested silhouettes that had quote bubbles that gave the illusion that the silhouettes were speaking. In the quote bubbles would be sayings like "I recommended TITLE OF BOOK" or "TITLE is my favorite book." This was such a great suggestion. I did a google search and found several different silhouettes that I brought into Photoshop and sized to approx 6.5". I then printed out all the silhouettes and we cut them out. I made sure to make an even amount of male vs female silhouettes. I then created some quote bubbles in Photoshop and using the lists I had of student recommended books I typed up the different sayings (being sure to pick an even number of boys and girls). I then printed out the bubbles and wrote either a G or a B on the back of each so I could match the right gender with the right gender silhouette.Here are some blank quote bubbles you can add your own text to.

Once it was time to put up the display I put two silhouettes on each shelf and added the quote bubbles. For the top of the display I made two large quote bubbles that said "Student Recommended" in one and "& Favorite Books" in the other.

That's all there is to it!

May: Steampunk and Inventors / Inventions Display

Did you know that May is National Inventors' Month? I had no idea (apparently it was just moved from August to May, you can read more about it here). I was trying to find something cool to display during the first two weeks of May and I luckily found out about National Inventors' Month, which gave me an awesome excuse to create a STEAMPUNK display!!

I have been wanting to do a steampunk display for a very long time, but we never seemed to have enough steampunk genre books to complete the display. Recently I have noticed that we were purchasing more steampunk books for the Upper School and the Middle School has always had a ton. I asked the Middle School Librarian if I could borrow five books for the display and she graciously said yes! Finally I had enough books to create an amazing display!

With the help of our parent volunteers and out student volunteers I created three displays. One is focused just on steampunk. The second is focused on books that cover a broad range of inventions through the years, or focuses entirely on a countries inventions.... nothing too specific. The third display was books that focused on specific inventors and/or inventions. The National Inventors' Month theme really inspired me to tie inventions in with steampunk and I could not be happier with the results.

For the decor I drew up a bunch of gears. I chose a different color theme for each bookcase/display. Steampunk had silver, browns and blacks. Broad inventions were dark purple, blue and burgundy. Specific inventions/inventors was hot pink, lime green, blue, yellow... (I really liked how the traditional steampunk with silvers and browns turned out the best).

Here are some templates of gears if you want to create your own (Our student volunteers were so helpful with cutting these out).

I then created two signs, one for the steampunk display and one that I printed out twice and used for each of the other displays (I would have made separate signs for each display but it was a lot of work and I ran out of time).

I placed the gears in groups throughout the display, I tried my best to match gears up so they looked more legit.

That is all there is to it. I hope you like the display. There are so many examples of steampunk displays out there, I found a lot on pinterest! Please feel free to use any of my signs/templates!