Styling Librarian: Staff Online Book Club in Elementary School Library

My personal challenge- fill out a dot for EVERY book I’ve read this year. I already track all books read in GoodReads, this was another visual layer for students to see. I don’t advise that you do this with little stickers per book, feels like you’ve barely scratched the surface when you’ve actually read over 300 books. (This is an ongoing challenge after promoting “What’s your dot?” for Read Across America”: http://bellbulldogreaders.edublogs.org/2012/01/16/whats-your-dot/  Students filled out numerous dots that covered a wall during Read Across America Week in addition to filling out quick question large dots with their favorite authors, genres, characters, and books.)

This year I had the inspiration to use wonderful GoogleDocs for a specialized online book club for my school staff members. I had fun running this for a number of months exposing colleagues to books I thought would match each personality and interest in addition to collecting their reviews on a spreadsheet for other’s future reference.

I brought the staff book club through reading children’s literature from poetry books to biographies to non-fiction books to picture books to fiction book treasures. It was fun to have others dig into new books that were a little outside of their normal curriculum focus and additionally find how they made connections to their instruction and had fun sharing the books with their students as well. Below is their review sheet. I simply alphabetized the sheet by title even though the librarian in me wants to sort by dewey number.

https://docs.google.com/a/beaverton.k12.or.us/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AvIChRmi7MFMdHl0NHdlT1U3VEtQZGJlVDRvQ2NFdUE&output=html