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Thanks so much to all who answered...These are GREAT ideas! Original posting: Hi Almighty Brain: I'm looking to add a little more excitement to my library. I would love any ideas for contests, or ways of promoting reading, or things you do to help the teachers in your building. Doesn't have to be complicated...simple ideas etc. I will share it all in a hit. Thanks, Diane Briggs SLMS Troy High School Troy, NY briggsd@troy.k12.ny.us answers: You could try a "Book Speed Dating" activity, where you put a pile of books on the tables and set an egg timer so the students get a certain amount of time to start reading each book. It exposes them to some new books that maybe they wouldn't have tried otherwise. What I've done a couple times during the month of May is ask kids to show me their public library cards (for over the summer reading). Then I check their name off on a list of students and give them a small treat. (I've had a couple kid try to show me someone else's library card!) The public librarians love the cooperative spirit. I check out about a hundred books (fiction, nonfiction, and biography) to a patron I call U R a Winner. Then the books are put back on the shelf. When a student chooses that book it shows it's already checked out, so I look to see if it got back on the shelf before it was checked it...no, it's UR A Winner...I ring a bellhop bell and real loud say something like, "U R A Winner, just for checking out this book you win...1 dollar, or 2 half dollars, or 4 quarters, or etc..." You get the picture. Then we also announce it on the morning show. So and so just walked in the library or was sent to the media center to get a book and walked away with a crisp dollar bill. Stop in to find out how you too can be a winner. It's fun. We use book fine money to pay for it. At the end of the year I usually have 60 or 70 books still on the shelf checked out to U R a Winner. So I know what didn't get checked out and I might do a display of them (after taking them off U R a winner). <G> I don't know if your students have a sign-in sheet, but I had a contest where whomever had the most sign-ins with a minimum of 30 minutes per visit, plus reading (this you can work out, we are a technical school, so the material is different). I then gave out a free memory stick to the winner. It actually was a nice contest and come to think of it, I need to do this again. We have a student/staff book club. Once a month we meet to discuss our current book and vote on the book for the next month. We meet during the lunch period (we have 5 lunches) and sell pizza for $.75 a slice, offer a free soda and cookies - of course we lose money but our principal tries to give us money every year to help with expenses. We have about 50 students/staff that are in the club so we are happy with the turnout. Sometimes we have a very lively discussion. During Teen Read Week we reward the top 20 readers in our school, based on book check out. We offer 1 free coffee/cocoa/chai tea per day to the students during the week. We used to do something called Adopt-a-book Week. The Student Council would sign-up students to adopt a book, they paid for the book, got first check- out and we put a bookplate in the book "Adopted by...or In Memory of ... whatever they requested. We also promoted this during Open House and parent/teacher conferences. We always had lots of parents that would adopt a book for us. Even the staff would adopt books. The great thing about this program was that the students usually adopted books they really wanted to read, like sports bios or fiction that they liked. Parents and staff adopted the expensive resource books. The reason we no longer do this is because our source could no longer front us the books for free and wait for 2 months for their money. We used to get between $2000 and $3000 in books from this program. Here's what I'm doing... costs money though. The PTO had some money to spare and I was the lucky winner! This is for 5th -8th graders... it's going very well. I stole the TTT grid from someone else, can't remember who, and adapted it for my promotion. Maybe you can find a way to adapt it for your high schoolers and budget. I got this idea from another LM-NET listserver and it's fun, creates relationships, and builds a base of readers, both teachers and students!!! Every six weeks, I ask teachers to email me what they're currently reading. I then create placards showing their books title and cover and place these outside the door of their room. The students see them and some are surprised at what their teachers read, esp. in the math department! (For some reason, they think math teachers sit around at night solving math problems...go figuee <no pun intended>:)). The teachers have the ability to make a book highly checked out because of their relationships with their students and some find common ground of something to talk about and discuss with them because of books both student and teacher has read. They love it, and it's always popular with my staff here. If I don't have a placard by their door when they come out, they'll email me telling me I forgot theirs...and off I go to make one : ) BTW I use powerpoint and a laminating machine to make small 4x6 placards. Thanks mysterious listserver for suggesting this about a year or so ago!!!! I purchased several of the ALA Graphics Celebrity Read posters. I taped smaller pictures of the posters to half gallon jars. When anyone checks out a book, they can write their name on a ticket and add it to any jar. During National Library Week - I'll draw one ticket from each jar and give the posters away. I'm pretty flexible, and if students say they forgot to sign a ticket when they take a book out, I let them sign when they return it. I am excited to see what sort of responses you get! One very simple that I do is have some sort of "brain teaser" on my door each day - one month I did Mad Gabs, another month, I did picture puzzles (where you have to put the pictures together to form a phrase) and for December, I am doing crazy names for common Christmas carols (i.e. The Wee Percussionist is The LIttle Drummer Boy). It's been really fun because the kids stop and try to figure them out and like to stop in and tell me their guesses :-) Some kids even make a point to visit the library each day just to see what's on the door! I few times during the year I host a coffee house all day in the library. In October I do scary stories, February I do book quotes, and in May I do poety. I sell coffee and cookies all day. The themed activity goes on for part of the period. Like in October, I had college drama kids come in and do scary stories. I decorate all black and goth with lights & halloween decorations. I move the tables in different arrangements for a coffee house look. I'm so busy I have to turn kids away. Good luck! -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note: All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. You can prevent most e-mail filters from deleting LM_NET postings by adding LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU to your e-mail address book. 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