BLUEBONNET BOOKS!!!

If you couldn't tell by the title, I'm pretty excited about Bluebonnet books. I think they may be a reason why I wanted to become a librarian! If you're not familiar, every year the Bluebonnet committee picks twenty outstanding 3rd grade- 6th grade books. When a student reads 5 or more they can vote on their favorite. The book with the most votes wins the Bluebonnet Award. I can remember reading these books every year as a kid and even as a teacher I would check them out so my students had the chance to vote. This summer I even got the opportunity to attend a TLA Bluebonnet session where I got to meet the committee members and hear about the selection process. Ok, enough already, I could go one for days!

At my campus, the tradition has been that only 6th grade participates in the Bluebonnet program. The 6th grade reading teachers make it a part of their curriculum and it even goes into students' grades. I'm all for that, but I changed it a bit this year by opening it up to all 3rd grade-6th grade students. So, this is what the program will look like this year:

For my kiddos who read 5 books- they get a pencil, they are able to vote for their favorite, and they'll have their picture displayed in the "Hall of Fame". I'm wanting to have mini-voting booths set up in the library at the end of January with ballots and stickers to make it as real as possible. My "Hall of Fame" is in the front foyer so everyone can see the Bluebonnet readers. If a student reads 10 books, they will receive a free book. If kids read 15 books I'm hoping to have a Bluebonnet breakfast with blueberry muffins, blue milk, etc...to celebrate. Finally, if students read all 20 books they will receive all of the prizes plus a free goodie bag.

So all of my 3rd-6th grade classes sat through my Bluebonnet lesson during their library time last week. I showed off some of the books, showed them how to track their reading, talked about prizes, and showed them book trailers. This was, by far, their favorite:                                                                                                            

As I talked about the program, the kids seemed genuinely excited. I made it clear that I wanted to explain the program to all of the 3rd-6th graders before the books were available for checkout. I told them they would be available first thing Monday morning (today). I swear since I did those first few Bluebonnet lessons last Monday, we had huge groups of kids come into the library EVERY morning asking about Bluebonnet books. Since the kids were so eager I assumed we would have a huge check-out this morning. I got nervous about having a big crowd of kids trying to get a hold of a small amount of books, so we had made numbers to give kids to keep them in order and we printed up blank wait lists so kids could sign up for the book they wanted when they all were checked out.

Well, I dreamt about Bluebonnet books all weekend long and this morning I got up extra early to fight off the crowd of kids and get everything organized. I just knew it would be crazy like Black Friday or something. When 7:45 rolled around we had........1 kid waiting at the door. Womp, womp.  *sigh* I guess it's to be expected...if I were a kid and had to wait over the weekend, I would have forgotten too. The good news is all the copies were checked out by 9:30 this morning and some of our waiting lists are over 20 people long. I hope we can keep the momentum through January. 

To take a look at this year's nominees head over to TLA ....like I told my kids, I haven't read all of them yet, but there hasn't been one I didn't like! If you're a classroom teacher I encourage you to introduce these books to your student and promote them within your own classroom!