Need Parents To Help In The Library? Connect To Them With Bloomz!

Libraries are the heart of the school.

They are the most active, engaging and beautiful places in schools and communities.

Celebrations, collaborations, special visitors and events, learning, creating and so much more takes place in school libraries everyday.

Along with this comes the challenge of keeping track of everything, organizing this wonderful chaos into a library program and place that makes a difference in the lives of your students, teachers and everyone in the school community.

There were a lot of times that I needed a little help in the library.

There was the time that I needed to find a pig to visit the 3rd graders and parent volunteers to help in the library when we were celebrating Mo Willems new book Happy Pig Day.

Then there was Dot Day three years ago when we created all of that fabulous art work....

and we needed parent volunteers to help display it in the library and throughout the school.  

                      

Every fall and spring during parent/teacher conferences we held the Scholastic Book Fair.  

It would have been really nice to round up book fair volunteers easily and bring more parents into the library during conferences for a conversation about their children.

Oh.....and how about when we Ditched The Dewey and Diana, Brianna and I reorganized the nonfiction two weeks before school started.  

We sure could have used a few parents to volunteer then!

Well, I have something that I would have loved to help me out in the library! In fact, it can lend help to all of us in our libraries.   

It is called Bloomz and is known as the one app for all your parent communication.  

I wrote about Bloomz in the post A One Stop Shop For All Your Parent Communication...In The Library, Classroom and Community With Bloomz!  This will be a good place for you to start, too.

When you are in the Bloomz app, you will see a little blue circle with a + sign in the right hand corner.  

Click on this and it will take you into....

a list of things you can do as an educator within the Bloomz app.

There are several different types of posting that will lend that help you need in the library including Announcement, Event, Volunteer Help and Parent Teacher Conference.  

Let's take a look at a few of these.  

If I would have created an Announcement about Bacon's visit to the library, it could have looked like this.  

This Announcement was super easy to create.  They even let you add photos or take them while posting to Bloomz.

During the Scholastic Book Fair's, we could have asked for Volunteer Help.  

In the Volunteer Help, you will find Volunteer Asks to easily ask volunteers to bring supplies for the events.  

As a teacher librarian, I welcomed parents into our library anytime and loved having them visit.  I also enjoyed welcoming as many as I could during parent/teacher conference time in the fall and spring.  

With Bloomz, you can set up Parent Teacher Conferences by adding the times, breaks and how long you want each conference to be.  It will automatically generate the....

time slots which will allow parents to fill in with the conference time they want.  It is easy to keep signups private too.

The last is setting up an Event and I could have used this several times each week as we were always looking for help with Author and Illustrator Skype visits and...

special events and celebrations we hosted on a regular basis.  

When we celebrated Happy Bubble Gum Day every year, my teacher friend Tracy Ferguson and I, along with my own children, wrapped hundreds of packs of gum with little notes, created posters, and worked with our students at the bubble gum booth each morning during that week.  

I could use Bloomz to create the Event....

and even ask for Volunteer Asks at the bottom.

This includes asking for Items and Tasks to cover things like wrapping the notes around the bubble gum and working in the Bubble Gum Day Booth.

As you can see, Bloomz will give you the help that you need in the library.  It will keep your library running smoothly, include parents in the library community and bring amazing connections to your space.

And most of all….It will make a difference for your students, parents and you!  

You can sign up for Bloomz here and try it out for your library and classroom too!  

Make sure you follow Bloomz on Facebook and…

@BloomzApp on Twitter for more ideas and lots of updates coming soon.

And remember.....as you invite pigs named Bacon into your library and other crazy things that will make your library the place to be, you have help.  

You have Bloomz.