The First Day of School

Here it is -- the moment I've been preparing for since the last day of school in June.  I've enjoyed my summer, but I've done a lot of work to make sure this will be a great school year.  I think the library shows the effort.

First of all (and I wish I'd taken pictures of the piles) our school librarian SWAT team came in and helped me weed 2,177 books.  What is SWAT?  Each summer we have the option of having a team of librarians come to our schools for a couple of days to do whatever work has piled up over the school year.  Sometimes that involves rearranging the library, other times processing books.  I had never taken advantage of our SWAT team, but my library desperately needed weeding so I asked for a team this year.  Four of us worked for two days and the shelves look so much better!

Last week I started setting up displays and bulletin boards for the new year.  I am very grateful to Pinterest -- I used many ideas I found there.  Here's what will greet the students today:

The Theme for the month is Dystopian Fiction. The Hunger Games is still extremely popular at our school, so I thought I'd take advantage of it.

I also have processed a number of new books and
I have them out for students.  Some of these books are replacements for ones that were damaged or disappeared from the library.  I have some more to set out when these are taken.  My guess is that the Ripley's Believe it Or Not will last about 10 seconds before it's checked out.

This is the display of books nominated for the North Carolina Young Adult Book Award.  Ten books are nominated each year and I buy at least two copies of each book.  Students will get to vote in March.  I'm going to have to move this display because I'm having bookshelves built into all of my windows.  My fiction collection is way too crowded (even after weeding more than 900 books), so the bookshelves will wonderful to have.

I got this from Pinterest.  I'm really proud of the way it turned out and its message is particularly important for middle school students.

I haven't done a top 10 (in this case a top 15) bulletin board in a while.  These were the most checked out books last year (excluding books on the Battle of the Books list)

Another idea from Pinterest. My daughter hand-made the bubble letters. This board has already gotten a lot of positive comments from the staff.

This year I decided to do a drawing to be first to check out books from popular series.    It will be interesting to see how that goes.