Teen Read Week Fun

 

This has been a very different year for us with the 1:1 initiative beginning in our county. While we continue to work out the kinks and spend a great deal of time working with iPads and related issues, we must still celebrate and promote traditional programs in our media center. One of our favorite special events each year is Teen Read Week, and this year was no exception!

We began the week collecting books for our first ever Book Swap. Students brought in gently used books all week and picked up a ticket to redeem the same number of titles on Swap Day. We had hundreds of books brought in for this event! Students and staff members who participated were pleased with the selection and left with new books to read, all without having to purchase anything. We are looking forward to doing this again in May to prepare for our summer reading program. We can’t wait!

We also hosted a daily photo scavenger hunt for students. Each clue was reading-focused (Day 1-The Fault in Our Stars, Day 2-Shakespeare, Day 3-The Hunger Games Series) and required students to take a photo (yay for iPads!) of something that represented the topic in some way. They could not simply take a photo of a book cover. We encouraged them to think outside of the box and come up with some clever and creative representations. To tie in writing, we asked each student to submit a short description of how the photo represented the given topic. We were blown away with both the participation and the submitted photos! We randomly selected a daily participant to win a small prize and at the end of the week, we also randomly selected a grand prize winner who participated all week. Check out my Twitter post for a few examples of the responses we received:

Loving Photo Scavenger Hunt 4 Teen Read Week. Shakespeare challenge today! #BradwellInstitute students rock! #BItrw14 pic.twitter.com/5gHlNQulD2

— Melissa McCallar (@MelissaMcCallar) October 17, 2014

Additionally, we asked each club and sports group to create new read posters for the media center. We decided to hold a student vote and select the best eight to display, with the top vote getter earning a grand prize for the group. With a short school week, most asked to have the deadline extended, so we decided to make this an activity that we will wrap up later in the year. We had so much fun with all of these activities!