National Library Week

We had a great time celebrating National Library week at the DHS Library!  Before I get into that, I did promise to tell you who won our "Battle of the Books" March Madness event.  By only 5 votes, the Outsiders by SE Hinton beat out Harry Potter.  That is not how I expected it to go, but that is what I love about this job...never a dull moment!

Now for National Library Week.  We took an idea from Pinterest (no surprise here), and created a scavenger hunt for the students.  Our prize was an ipod shuffle.  Actually we had 2 that were generously donated by a person who prefers to stay anonymous.  The original scavenger hunt created by Kyna Hockenberry  for her library's Teen Tech Week was our model...Link to Pinterest

Blanca emailed the librarian who gave us her explanation as to how she used it and her permission for us to adapt her idea.  One big modification for us was that we made the students keep up with the paper.  The librarian whose idea we stole was a public librarian, and she kept the student punch cards posted on a wall.  We were afraid we would have too many, or something would happen to them if they were on display.  So each student became responsible for his/her scavenger hunt board.  Here is what ours looked like ...

I created this in Publisher which didn't take as long as I thought it would.  I imported a picture of an iPhone, and then created the shapes over the top of the picture.  Then I added the text or pictures on top of the shapes.

Back to the event...the idea of our scavenger hunt was to have the students doing 3 things each day, and the person with the most punches would win the iPod shuffle.  As the student completed an activity, one of the librarians used a hole punch to mark the finish of the event.  If the student set foot in the library, we punched the 1st button, which was the day of the week.  If they introduced themselves to the librarian of the day, we punched the second button, and the third button each day had them doing something different.  On Monday, students had to check out a book.  On Tuesday, they had to follow us on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.  On Wednesday, we had cupcakes in the library for all participants.  On Thursday, the students had to email, tweet, or FB us a picture of themselves reading.  We put the directions on the back of their iPhone sheet...(because who is going to remember all that!)

We left Friday off on purpose so that the students had the day to turn their iPhone into the library.  (Note: We used different hole punches, instead of just the round, so the students couldn't punch their own.  We had the "fancy" hole punches, like the butterfly, triangle, and square.)

We had a great time and plenty of participation.  We even met some students who had never been to the library before this week.  So I believe this event was a success! If we do this next year though, we should start with the cupcakes on Monday.  We had lots more participation after that event, but it was in the middle of the week. So the students starting on Wednesday didn't stand a chance of winning the iPod.

There were 9 students who finished all 12 activities.  Since there were only 2 iPods, we had a drawing.  Two lucky students went home with an iPod shuffle; they were Willie and Morgan.  Yay!

See you next time!