Get Books in Their Hands

Only about half of the books I acquired for my room over the summer.

 If you're like me, you spent your summer acquiring books for your classroom. I frequently scour my local thrifts stores, I do my daily Bing searches for points, I also simply end up buying books that I've been dying to read. And there are always a few books the school purchases for me-- that's how I always choose to use my "supply" budget from the school. If you teach secondary, you have a lot of classes and a lot of students. I teach 5 assigned courses and 2 independent courses this year. How do I let all of my students have a chance to check out the new books? Here's my solution.

I place the books (in this case I selected the most wait-list-worthy since I had too many) on the table in my room. I tape a sheet of paper underneath each of the books, labeled with the title. My students have time to peruse the titles between classes and even a few minutes during class. They can put their name on as many wait lists as they wish. Each day in each class, I discuss three of the books in class-- sort of a mini book advertisement/ book talk-- and after every class has heard about those three books, I make the actual wait list. This quick description of the books takes less than five minutes and gives the kids who might not look at the books the chance to get interested. And they do. For the wait-list, I randomize the names of those signed up so that my early classes don't always get an advantage. Each student gets one week with the book and can request to be put back on the bottom of the list if they don't finish the book in the allotted time. As you can see below, Cut Me Free is already called for until almost second semester!

This is my quick and simple solution for getting a lot of excitement generated for my new books each year. It also gives every student a chance to have access to them.

Coming up: How to choose books for the room