Book Swap Anyone?

Greetings!

I’ve been giving out titles of good books for the last few weeks and I thought I’d think of something else for you this week.

Why don’t you hold a Book Swap? Hold it in May near the end of the year and students will leave with ‘new’ books to read over the summer. What is a Book Swap, I hear you asking. A Book Swap is just that. Students bring books they no longer want or have outgrown and swap them for books they want. I held a Book Swap just before Christmas for the junior high students only. Here is what I did and what I learned.

Students bring in books they want to swap. For each book brought in the student receives a ticket. On the day of the swap, the student can redeem the ticket for a book. If they bring in 10 books, they get 10 tickets and can swap for 10 books. It’s really pretty simple. But here are some hints that may help make your Book Swap run smoothly.

1. Be sure that children have parent permission to swap the books. You’ll have to decide what will work best for you.
2. I had the students keep track of their own tickets. I did this with our junior high earlier this year. If they lost their ticket, too bad. You might choose to handle this differently, but I decided I did not want to be responsible for tickets for 90 students!
3. Check the books as they come in and don’t give tickets for books that aren’t appropriate for other students in your school. This can be handled with kindness and tact. I told the students ahead of time to bring books that were appropriate for an Adventist school and also to bring books that other junior high students would enjoy. If they brought a book that they had outgrown, other junior high students wouldn’t want it either. (I plan to do another one in May with the whole school participating.)
4. I set up the books in the library and sort of organized them into sections. Basically, I had one area for nonfiction and another for fiction.
5. Students came in to ‘shop’ and left with the books they ‘bought’ with their tickets.
6. I made sure that students knew ahead of time that there was a possibility that they might bring in 8 books, but only find 2 or 3 that they really liked.
7. I set a time period of about an hour or two for only those with tickets to come and buy books. After that time period, I then opened it up to others to buy books for $0.25 each. The money went into the library petty cash, not to the students.
8. One good idea that I read from another school is to let the older students go first. The first year that school had Kindergarteners choosing chapter books over the picture books and there was nothing much left for the older students! The next year they let the older students go through first and there was plenty to choose from. That school then sold their extra books for ten cents apiece after the ticket shopping was done.
9. If you have done some weeding, consider including those weeded books in with your Book Swap. I also brought some of my books from home that I no longer wanted.

If you have held a Book Swap, you might have some good ideas to share with us. What worked for you and what would you change another time?

I hope you have a great week and a safe Spring Vacation!

Audrey
Sdalibrarian.blogspot.com