Hosting a Successful Literacy Week in Middle School

Elementary schools seem to have the market on Literacy Week. They do it big and the kids love it. Dr. Seuss stuff everywhere, dress up days, community readers, the whole nine yards.

In my experience, most middle schools and high schools hardly even acknowledge the existence of Literacy Week. Reasons for that seem to range from uninterested students, the lack of school-wide literacy excitement, focus in other areas, and activities that are too "babyish" for secondary students.

I work in a literacy rich school. My students read. Our school-wide 20 Book Challenge has breathed life and excitement into our school. We use events all throughout the year to keep the excitement and engagement levels up and Literacy Week is no exception.

It can be quite the challenge to design a week full of activities that students and staff will enjoy and participate in on the secondary level. I thought I'd share some of the things we have done that have been successful.

Every morning we do a trivia contest over the loudspeaker and the first class to email me with the right answer wins a breakfast treat for the whole class. I send time stamped screenshots so everyone can see who won and then deliver the treats. I use our most popular books and pull questions from there. There is a different question each day. Everyone seems to get pretty excited over it.

We run a week long door decorating contest. It has to be literacy themed and is done through the lunch class. The class with the best door wins an ice cream sundae party. I usually share pictures from the years before and I always hype it up with the staff and students. I remind them to go big. :) We use a group of students who are readers and this year we added some business partners as our judging panel. I give them a basic rubric and I take them room to room scoring the doors.

We do a dress-up day where students and staff can dress as their favorite book character. I give away gift cards as prizes. We don't have as much participation as I'd like but we do have kids and teachers who really enjoy it. I don't always do a great job of making sure everyone knows it's happening and that's on me but the kids who do know, really enjoy it.

We do a DEAR Day--Drop Everything and Read. All of our ELA and Reading classes are assigned a "mystery" reading location (somewhere around the school and usually outside). Teachers often bring blankets, pop-up tents, lawn chairs, etc. for the kids to read in. This year it was unusually cold for Florida so our teachers stayed in their classrooms but many of them moved the desks out of the way and still use the blankets, beach towels, fuzzy chairs, etc. Some of them even put up the crackling fire video from YouTube on their projector screens. The kids really loved it!

The past few years we've done a scavenger hunt where we use unique facts about teachers and their favorite books and send kids to figure out who they are and report back. This year I accidentally deleted the file I'd been working on and got it back, but not in time for the the hunt to actually take place. The students have always enjoyed it though.

We do a book logging challenge for the duration of the week. The team with the most books successfully logged during the week wins donuts for the whole team. It gets pretty competitive. This is also the week that we have the largest number of books logged. We will have thousands of books logged during the week. Not all of them will be accepted but we get a lot of kids logging their books.

We take a group of students to the Elementary School that is next door to us and read to the younger students. In the past, we've taken our 8th grade Reading students to read to the kindergarten kiddos. This year they requested that we bring enough students to read to 15 classes worth of students. It was amazing! Our kids enjoy going and their students love it.

My FAVORITE way to end Literacy Week is with a an author visit but I blew my budget for author visits in October when we hosted Kwame (totally worth it!!!!). Author Skypes are also always an awesome option but we just did that the week before. This year our last day fell on World Read Aloud Day so I read some of my favorite picture books to our ASD and ESE Self-Contained units. Those kids have my heart so it was fun to get to go read to them.

What ideas do you have to make Literacy Week work in your school? I'd love to hear from you!