Oldies but Goodies

Greetings!
If your library looks a little like my library you have lots of great books that don’t look too attractive on the outside. You try to get your students to read these stories, but they naturally gravitate to the newer, books with clean, attractive, full-color covers. We understand since these books naturally appeal to us, too. But how can we get students to pick up the older stories and read them? I have a few ideas for you.

Clean the books that you can clean. I have found that the books with a shiny, but dirty cover can usually be cleaned fairly easily. There are products on the market you can buy, special cleaners and erasers, but I was not having much luck with them and tried a dab of hand soap by the sink. I had a damp rag and put a bit of soap on the rag and started rubbing. Then I carefully wiped it all off with a clean rag that was a bit damper and dried the book. It looked almost new. This worked with the books that have a protective sheen, NOT a cloth cover.

Cover books with a ‘new’ dust jacket. I have covered books using two methods. I found a nice color cover from a place like Amazon or Barnes and Noble and copied it in a Word document, then pasted it on a dust jacket that I cut to fit the book. I have a plastic dust jacket protector I use to keep the jackets looking nice. Other schools laminate the dust jackets or cover with clear contact paper.

Get students to do as much of the work as you can. I set up a small shelf that I labeled “Lonely Books” and acted very sad that the books hadn’t been read for a long time. Then I asked students to choose a book, read it and let me know if they thought the book was good enough to keep in the library or if they thought it was time to weed that title out. If they liked it and thought others would like it, then they made a dust jacket for the book. I learned that it worked better if I cut the dust jacket out and lightly sketched out the area for artwork, title, spine label, and blurb. Then I let them make a wonderful cover. I promoted the ‘new’ books and other students checked some of them out. (This would make a great book report idea!)

Go with the theme. When you are studying a unit, check out as many books on the theme that you can. Get all levels of books, picture books, informational books, stories, magazines. Display these in your classroom so students can browse through them. If you are the librarian, find out what units the teachers are studying for the year and make sure that there is a variety of material to support the unit.
I hope these ideas have helped you continue to make your library or classroom the fun place to be and read.

Have a great week,
Audrey