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!

Author Visit, a Big Honor, & Daddy

This past week was actually pretty low-key for the Media Center.

Monday: double classes for book check-out
Tuesday: afternoon book celebration for our self-contained ESE students who just finished the 3-5 SSYRA book Wish. We watched a book trailer, had a discussion, and made lunchbox notes for each other because the main character always wanted to get a note in her lunchbox. It was pretty awesome!
Wednesday: I was supposed to have Girls PE but they rescheduled so I didn't have anyone and ended up covering for a teacher who had to leave early. I got all caught up on 20 Book Challenge responses and we were able to get the report run. I mean, look at these amazing numbers! We are almost 300 books ahead of where we were this time last year and we broke records last year.

Thursday: I got to take some of our students to Hoover Middle School to see author Pablo Cartaya who wrote our SSYRA book The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora and he also wrote Marcus Vega Doesn't Speak Spanish.  Mrs. Watkins teaches a Reading class that has all of our ESOL students in it and most of them primarily speak Spanish. She read Epic Fail with them which was really cool because it is a bilingual book. I got with our ESOL District contact and told her about the opportunity to take these kids to go see Pablo and why it was so important and she helped me find the funding to take them. You see, how often do these students get to see someone who looks like them, speaks like them, and writes characters just like them who is very successful in person? How often in our school system do they have the opportunity to ask questions in their native language and get answers in that same language? How often do they miss out on opportunities because of the language barrier? I knew it was important to take them but I didn't realize until we got there what a life-changing moment it was for some of these students. They were SO engaged! Pablo is really funny and a great storyteller. He switches back and forth between English and Spanish. Our students asked some really amazing questions and all of them made it a point to tell me how much they enjoyed the visit. A few of the girls told me their favorite part was when Pablo had me dance with him. Our book club kids also got to go with us and they had a blast too. It made me so happy to see how an author can deeply impact kids who are so different and come from different walks of life. It was a powerful day! I'm so thankful to Ana Woodbrey, Hoover's Media Specialist, for putting such an awesome day together!

Friday: My sweet GAPP kiddos were there for book check-out and it was such a relaxing day. Fridays are short days because of early release so we returned books, renewed books, checked out books and then the kids could either work on their 20 Book Challenge (logging or correcting responses) or they could sit and read. I got to sit with them and read too! I finished Lu by Jason Reynolds! It is SO good! Definitely my favorite one in the Track series. I always have such great conversations about books with these kids. I always walk away encouraged and with a full heart!

The other big thing that happened this week is that on Monday, my admin team and all the front office people came in with flowers and a balloon and made an announcement over the intercom that I had been voted (by our staff) as the Southwest Middle School 2018-2019 Teacher of the Year. It's a really, really big honor. So many teachers and so many students stopped by to congratulate me. I've never imagined what it would feel like to win but it is so surreal. I'm so very honored and at the same time, I feel a bit like I'm taking credit for everyone else's hard work. Everything I do is part of a team effort. I don't do anything alone. We do some cool things but we do it together. I work with the best people!

After finding out, on my way home from school I called my husband and then I called my mom. As I was talking to my mom, I got upset because it was such a punch in the gut that I couldn't also call my dad to tell him. I've always been super close to my dad. Always. Two years ago, right as I was starting out in the Media Center, my dad died of Cancer only 4 weeks after diagnosis. My dad is the one who convinced me to be a teacher. I didn't want to be a teacher. I wanted to be anything BUT a teacher. He is the one who sat me down and told me that I was made for this and that he would support me no matter what, but that teaching is what he thought I should do. When I graduated college, he was clapping the loudest and cheering his heart out as I walked across that stage as the first college graduate in my immediate family. When I got my first teaching job, my dad built me a bookshelf for my classroom, helped me move all my stuff in, and bought team bags for the Girls Basketball team I coached. He came to their County Championship game and was so proud. Both of my parents have always, always supported me and pushed me to do my very best. My dad was a really hard worker. If there was something to be done, he wouldn't rest until it was done. If a kid needed something, he didn't care what it took, he would make sure they had it. My dad grew up in extreme poverty in a single parent home and made sure I knew what it was like to live like some of the kids I teach everyday. He told me to make sure that I was their champion, to be the light for them; that I was there fighting for them every day because some of them wouldn't have anyone else that would do that for them. He is the reason I'm so driven. He is the reason I give everything I have to these kids. He is the one who told me that if anyone could make being a librarian cool and get kids to read, it would be me. It is bittersweet to be given such an incredible award and not be able to share it with him.

I used to think that winning Teacher of the Year was an award you win and then that is it. I'm learning there is so much more to it than that. I had an application due early this week to be considered for Brevard County Teacher of the Year. I had to give a description of my job responsibilities, list all the awards and recognition I've received in the last 5 years, explain how I demonstrate all 14 traits of an excellent teacher in 250 words or less (they were serious! Have they met me? I don't say anything in under 250 words), and I had to write what I love the most about teaching. That was my favorite part. Not this coming week, but the following week I'll have to go sit in front of a big committee and interview. I also have to schedule to go have my photo taken. I've heard some teachers complain about everything it involves, but I'd like to share my thoughts with you. I don't have expectations of winning anything, BUT if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do the very best I possibly can because that is who I was raised to be. I want to represent my family well. I want to serve my school well--they choose me for this and I plan to give it my best. I want to represent my profession well. It is a job that is always on the chopping block by politicians and board members because they seem to think that all we do all day is check out books and anyone can do that. My job is so much more than that and I want to do it justice.

This coming week is going to be a really big week! I'm doing something so cool I couldn't have ever even dreamed it was possible. Stay tuned for details!

Not Just a Book Fair: It's a Life Event

This past week I've been running my Scholastic Book Fair and I have two more days of it this week. When Book Fair comes, I go ALL out.

Why? People ask me that question all the time. It's a lot of work and it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time.

Why not? Mostly though, I do it because it is SO very hard to get middle school kids to care. You have to give them something to be excited about. Our kiddos look forward to the Book Fair each year and really get into it.

For Book Fair I decorate like crazy based on the theme, set up Maker Space stations tied to the theme, play music, tag the books for teacher recommendations and for which categories the books count towards in our 20 Book Challenge, and I dress in costume every single day.

When I first started doing Book Fairs, I didn't have stations but I was doing all the other stuff. We set up the stations for a family night and then no one came. We were so bummed that we kept them up for the classes coming in the next day and the kids LOVED it! From then on, stations became necessary. It doesn't hurt that it helps my sales and helps teachers feel better about bringing their classes to me for the Book Fair.

Sometimes Scholastic has great themes and sometimes, the themes either aren't suited well for our population, for middle school, or for our school in general. Last fall the theme was Southwestern. Well, my whole school is decorated like that and our kids wouldn't have cared about that theme so I chose a fiesta theme from a few years back. This fall their theme was unicorns and fairies and while that is super cute for elementary school, I didn't know if my middle schoolers would go for it. I polled them during orientation to see how they felt about it and they were not into it. Instead, I went with a sports theme for this year's Book Fair and the kids are LOVING it!

I always decorate the circulation desk in a big way (pirate ship, giant tent, enormous taco filled with books, and now a concession stand). We also have a headless baby who always comes to the Book Fair. We used her to be a pirate the first year and the kids loved her so much that I just dress her up and put her out each year. She's also been a fisherman girl, a fiesta girl, and now she's a tball player. I hang decorations from the ceiling in the actual fair part, put decorations on the tables with the books, and then I try to put decorations on the walls of the media center where I can.

The stations are a mix of standards-based Maker Space activities, writing activities, and things that are just plain fun. In the past we've had building challenges, color sheets, puzzles, games such as tic-tac-toss, friendship bracelet making stations, story building stations, etc. Last year the hit of the Book Fair was making paper bag ponchos out of grocery bags from Publix. This year my stations are a Lego building challenge to build something sports related, a structure building challenge to build a structure that supports a basketball, tailgate toss (corn hole), jersey design station, and pin the football on the goal (a version of pin the tail on the donkey), and an Athletes Give Back station to decorate a whale for the Vineyard Vines #whalesforacause campaign. It's been awesome to help my students participate in some community service.

I schedule all the classes to come in with their Language Arts class and if they are in Intensive Reading they come with those classes as well. I schedule a class for the first half of the class period and another class for the last half of the same class period. On early release days I schedule only one class because there just isn't enough time. We also keep the Book Fair open before school and during all the lunches. Everyone has an opportunity come as many times as they want or need to.

Book Fair takes a lot out of me but it's such a good thing for our school and our kids. I'm sure there are other ways to do Book Fairs and I know a lot of schools (elementary schools especially) who make a lot more than I do during their Book Fair without all the fuss but I pride myself on giving my best to these kids and this is my best so that's what I do. I hope this post gives you some good ideas for things you can try at your Book Fair if you are looking for a way to change things up.