If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know that I’ve been exploring notions of busyness. As part of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I can accomplish in limited bursts of time. I’m doing something this school year that I’m calling “fast librarianship”. I think I need a new name for it, but it does work for me.
The idea is this: develop/produce valuable content that is productive for my students in short periods of time. Here are a few of the fast projects I’ve been doing/stealing, Shoutout to my sidekick Cynthia for not just putting up with this but actively participating!
- Bathroom book blurbs – I totally stole-this/got-inspired-by/adapted-this from Texas librarian Jamie Leroy. Every month I get together for two 20 minute periods with a group of 5th graders to create book posters for our student bathrooms. I pre-select about 6-8 new books that have awesome covers and great plots and drop individual covers and publisher blurbs into an 8×10 poster
in google drawings. The students read the book descriptions and decide on 4 books to advertise. I have the students edit the publisher blurbs and I make the edits in google drawings. At our next meeting we laminate the print-outs and post one book poster in each bathroom. Everyone gets a kick out of saying the word bathroom a lot and the books we advertise circulate more. Time spent: 40 minutes with students; 1 hour on my own per month.
- What we’re reading posters – got this one from Kristyn at Nightingale (and others!). While we don’t have room on the circulation desk to advertise what we’re reading, we do have some wall space. We’ve created identical docs in google drawings to drop in the covers of the book we’re currently reading. I like getting the covers from Titlewave – pictures are crisp and clear with no annoying extra logos. I purchased some clear plastic sign holders and put them on the wall. Time spent: 5 minutes every week
- Displays – This one’s a cheat since I have volunteers pulling the books from the shelf. But once I have all the books compiled for displays I’ve been using pop
sicle sticks and cardstock to make mini-signs to highlight certain books. For our Banned Books Week display I made mini-signs with the banned book ranking of all the books on display. Cute, informative and effective! Time spent: 15 extra minutes per display
If you’ve got some fast librarianship practices, we’d love to hear them!
-Karen Grenke