Our themes so far this year

My assistant and I have been constantly trying to create new and innovative ideas to get kids to the media center and to get them motivated to read.  We were fortunate enough to be able to get some buy in from the kids for a few of the programs we thought about doing.   We have started hitting this goal hard this year because we were finding a lot of great titles but not a lot of kids enjoying the books like we felt they should.  We spent some time collaborating and talking to a few kids and searching our Pinterest account and got some fantastic ideas.

First off, we started doing monthly themes with displays. We had done boards and posted covers and ideas but never created a specific display to go with it.  We also didn't have a blog or a site that we updated often with things.  Secondly, we have had some release themes.  (Some of our Seniors even welcomed House of Hades by Rick Riordan by wearing togas.)

In August and September, we had a ReadBox with books that have hit the screen (both big and televisions) and saw several titles, young and old fly off the shelves.    We put together the display and a bulletin board to match.  It was neat to see kids coming in and gravitating to a display that had some new titles.

The second full month of school was October so we hit the Zombie theme head on.  We made a cryptic bulletin board loaded with visuals of titles and creepy things.  Our school had a special zombie program where kids tried to turn others into zombies.  It fit perfectly with our theme and we even saw a few students go die hard and dress in Zombie clothes and makeup for Halloween. (Only those who had been turned wore the clothes, however.)

We rolled into November with a theme for males- we thought of No Shave November and decided to pull titles that boys would enjoy and place them on the shelves.  We made a catchy theme and added a selection of titles to the spindle.  We decided to shorten November because my assistant and I have a love for Dr. Who.

With that in mind, we decided to end November and roll into December with a Time Traveling Theme. We have found a large amount of Historical Fiction and Time Travel genre that don't circulate, so we pulled several from those genres and are building our own Tardis with some Daleks and Weeping Angels for display.  We decided the theme would be a tribute to the debut of the next season of Dr. Who which starts tomorrow. (Photos to come, as we have designed and built our Tardis, but it is unfair to display it before the actual date.)

We have some great ideas for things to come. Keep checking back as we will be adding more of our ideas soon.