Our Follett Book eFair Was Such A Hit! Read & Hear All About It Here, Friends.

We just had one of the best book fairs at Van Meter!  In fact, it was the very first Follett Book eFair we had and it was such a huge success with our students, teachers and families.  I can't wait to tell you all about it. 

Book fairs are an important part of our library and school community every year.  They support our readers, bring our families together to celebrate literacy, enrich our library and classroom libraries and so much more. 

With precautions and rules around COVID-19, I was excited to know that my friends at Follett have created a solution for our school community to host a book fair this fall that would include our entire school. 

With Follett Book eFairs, we give all students an opportunity to find books to read no matter where they are and to give them a lot of choice on books they love to read. 

If you remember from this earlier post on my blog, we kicked off our eFair in September.  

We ran it for 3 weeks and it was so much fun to get everyone excited about our eFair in a variety of different ways including reading contests, classroom contests and lots of marketing on our social channels and within the school. 

I loved how Follett kept me up to date throughout the entire eFair.  It made it easy to track of how we were doing and what we had to do to meet our goals.  

One night when we were out to eat, an alert even popped up on my Apple Watch.  How fun is that! 

As soon as our eFair ended, I received an email stating they were preparing our students' order for shipment and just two days later on a Friday...

I received another email saying it had shipped.  

And guess what?  By the next Tuesday (not even 5 days later), all of the books ordered from our eFair arrived at Van Meter. 

The boxes were packed perfectly and right on the top...

...were all of the packing slips.  

It was easy for us to get them out of the boxes and organize them on a couple of book carts for delivery. 

We also received an email with a detailed lists of each order and the books that went with the orders. 

My library associate, Diana, printed it off and cut them apart.  

This helped Diana as she pulled the books together for each individual order.  She placed the slip right inside of the book cover. 

It was easy for us to lay out the orders if we had certain classes in the library to pick them up and...

...and when Diana went around to deliver them to the students in their classrooms too. 

They were very excited to see her, 

especially when they realized they had received the books they had on their eFair Wish List.  

She was extra careful to hold the special gift purchases in the library for pickup. 

Again, Follett made it easy for us to print these off and...

..place them with the books in that order.  

We printed stickers from the eFair resources so students and families could write a little gift label to place inside of the book. 

We also made sure that ALL students received another eFair bookmark so everyone felt like they received something from the library in the deliveries. 

Another exciting thing that happened as our eFair closed was I received an email with the great news we had earned over $800.  

When I logged into the Follett Book eFair site, I saw this under Shop Your Rewards too. 

That week, Follett announced that we could shop from the...

...Follett Book eFairs site or...

...with Follett Titlewave Rewards.  

I am very thankful and excited for that.  Since I do the majority of our collection development and purchasing through Follett, this was going to make it so much more beneficial and timely for our school library collection. 

Our kids at Van Meter, at school and learning virtually, loved our Follett Book eFair.  And the best part, it put amazing new books into their hands and into our library, classrooms and homes. 

You can learn more about eFairs in the Follett webinar, Engage Your Entire School With An eFair, that I did last week as part of the double feature webinar, The Virtual Librarian. 

Here is a blog post with the recording and also..

...the Virtual Librarian Collection by Destiny, which contains lots of the eFair resources and ideas I shared in the webinar and these two posts too. 

You can learn more about Follett Book eFairs here on their site. 

We can't wait to have another starting right after Thanksgiving, so we can offer this opportunity and fun right before the holidays.  I hope that you bring one to your students and community this year too. 

Join 5 LIVE Author Events On October 19-23 For "Teach Graphix Week" From Skype in the Classroom!

We are very excited about all of the special library and events coming up next week.  As I put together Our Library and Learning Events for October 19-23 for Van Meter, not only did I included the virtual pop-in storytimes with Mrs. Hockenberry, but I also included five amazing events brought to us from our friends at Skype in the Classroom and Scholastic. 

It is Teach Graphix Week, with live author events each day. 

As shared on the Skype in the Classroom site, 

Learn how to create your own comics with Scholastic Graphix creators each day of the week at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST. 

Join Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet), 

Tui T. Sutherland (Wings of Fire), 

Jim Benton (Catwad), 

Shannon Wright (Twins), 

and Kevin Sherry (Squidding Around) for lessons on adapting prose into a graphic novel, drawing lessons, story development, using humor, and more.

Tune in all week long for activities you can do at home or in the classroom!

🌎 How to Participate 🌎

1) Choose your event below to find more information and click on the JOIN LINK on the day of the event (You don't need Skype or Teams to join. Select to watch on the web.) 👇

2) Share the event link with your students and families!

*All events have live captions in English, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), French and Hindi and they will be available on-demand.

You will find all of the information and links to each Skype in the Classroom event for Teach Graphix Week here, friends. 

We can't wait for all of the connections we will make throughout the week.  

Opening Our Library To Our Students and Teachers With New Destiny Library Shopping Lists and Procedures!

This week, we have been preparing to open our library for students to come for their library check out time each week.  We all couldn't be more excited! 

For the last two months, they have been checking out books through our BOOKHUB program and by using Destiny Discover to reserve books that are then delivered to them in their classrooms. They read the books in the classroom. When they are done, they put them in the class BOOKHUB box so our library associate, Diana, can pick them up to return back to the library for quarantine. 

This has worked great but it isn't the same as having all of our students come to the library to check out books and be part of the special reading community we have created. They all love coming to the library.

To prepare for next week with all of the students coming at their normal morning check out times, we practiced with two classes, one of our 2nd grade and one of our 4th grade. 

Our 2nd graders, wrote what books they wanted to look for on a sticky note...

...and brought it to the library.  

Our 4th graders, brought their Chromebooks and logged into their Destiny Discover accounts to...

...look up books they saw on the shelf.  

They didn't take them off of the shelf until they read about the book on Destiny to see if they wanted to check it out.  

With our younger students, we helped them get the book off the shelf.  We have shelf markers being made for them to use next week. 

They were all very excited to have Mrs. Hockenberry check out the books they found...

...especially when we told them...

...they could take them home. 

After we practiced with these two classes, I went home and thought about how I could make library check out time even better for our students and teachers, while keeping us safe. 

I came up with the My Destiny Library Shopping List. 

With the help of the My Destiny Library Shopping List poster (found here) I created in Buncee, 

our students in 2nd through 6th grade, will go to Destiny Discover in their classrooms before they come for library check out.  They will search for books and write down the title, call number and sublocation on their little shopping lists 

Our littles (preschool, TK, kindergarten and first grade) will also come to library, but will use their eyes to look for the books they want to check out.  We will have a lot spread out on the tables, above the shelves and of course, on the shelves. 

You will find the Buncee for the Library Check Out Time posters here.  Just make a copy and you can make changes to use with your students and teachers too. 

I am really excited about the little My Destiny Library Shopping Lists I created in Buncee. 

I created one that says, My Library Books Shopping List too.  You will find this Buncee for both here.

In the printing setting, I set it to Print Entire Image 9 times. I then clicked on the PDF button in the bottom left hand corner and saved it as a PDF...

...on my MacBook to print.  It was super easy to print these and cut into lots of My Destiny Library Shopping Lists for our kids to use next week.  

We couldn't be more excited to welcome our students and teachers back into the library to connect to books they love.  I know that procedures will change along the way, but we are in this together. 

And together, we will make it work for our readers.