The Middle School library celebrated Banned Books Week (September 23-29) by featuring a few of our most popular titles that have been banned or challenged somewhere in the US. Students were invited to lift the book covers on our bulletin board, in order read the reasons why!
September 15-October 15th is Latinx Heritage Month! We featured books in the library by Latinx authors, featuring Latinx characters, or about Latinx figures in history.
Berkeley Carroll Middle School students, and staff were given the opportunity to show off what books they read this summer. The colorful post-it note display showed an amazing variety of books read by our community of readers!
Our first bulletin board of the year cheerfully invited students to check out everything the Middle School library has to offer!
The Booklist Reader blog was in our course document as a Collection Development resource, but I also thought it would be a great resource for Reader’s Advisory. It’s a great site, as it is very current for a book review blog, and it is written by two YA librarians who really know their stuff!
I think this blog would be a great way of generating recommendations for Young Adults, especially because they do a lot of posts on trends and subjects. For example, they had one in March on March Madness, which highlighted YA books about basketball (a great reluctant reader subject!).
I also like how they do “Cover Trends” posts, which feature books with similar covers. For a reader who doesn’t know exactly what they want to read next, a cover similar to something they’ve responded to positively in the past could be a great starting off point! Chances are, the publishers know what they’re doing and it really is a similar read.
Cindy and Lynn also do their own “Best Of” lists, and annual “Book Awards” with really fun, unconventional award topics such as “The Book that Had the Most Holds at One Time (even before the author appeared on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah).”
manuela aronofsky 