Tournament of Books: Most popular

So, in honor of March Madness, and I love me some March Madness (FYI I won the pool for my building, even though it only included 7 people and yes, that is a sad bracket pool) (and also go Syracuse!) I decided to do an April Madness book tournament. Guess what, the kids looooove it. I was really surprised they liked it as much as they did.
Currently I have my top eight books going to the Eloquent Eight: Girl, Stolen, Pretty Little Liars, Ever After Ever, Found, The Maze Runner, Out of My Mind, Life As We Knew it and Witch and Wizard. I was totally bummed that Bruiser lost to Found, because I just adored Bruiser when I read it. However, I think more kids have read Found. Actually what has been more fun than the actual tournament is writing up the announcements.
Here is one:

"The eloquent Eight now has two new novels... Both were close. After Ever After beat Shelter by a small margin and Life As We Knew It only beat The Last Thing I Remember by three votes!!!

Today's match-ups include Bruiser, a realistic fiction story with a twist, versus Found, a mystery thriller, AND Witch and Wizard, a dystopian novel versus Paranormalcy, definitely not realistic fiction. Come down and vote to see who else will move on towards the championship. Don't forget that voting enters you in to win a prize!!"

 

I could totally be more creative, but I'm also trying to condense them for announcement purposes. My poster isn't the greatest, but I will make it better next year. Speaking of next year, I think I'm going to do a battle of the novel heroes for next year. Do I include Hunger Games, Katniss? I think Divergent's Tris would come pretty close to beating her...

 

 

Book Spine Poetry

April is National Poetry Month and of course I wanted to do something with the students for poetry. I wish I had some amazing technology tool or something cool like that to do with poetry (I always feel a little in the dark when it comes to that), but I did get to use my ipads which made me happy. So, I borrowed an assignment I had seen before and did book spine poetry with the students. Yesterday I had a 7th grade team in and the students had about 15 minutes to find their books and create a poem with them. I will say shelving all of those books super-sucked, but it was worth it. The kids were really excited.

Things I will do differently tomorrow and next year!
Set a timer: I did not do this with first hour and it was a HUGE mistake. They really took forever and then got a little crazy. I always gave my high schoolers a timer, so I'm not sure what I was thinking there.
Tone: I'm thinking you could definitely do something with tone here. And, I might have them decide what their poem means to them.

My two favorites are posted on here. One was super clever, and the other I thought was really funny. I hope they were trying to be funny!!

I'm still trying to think of a few good ideas for poetry in the library...