Christmas in the Library

Greetings!

I hope you got some much needed rest over the short Thanksgiving break. Now we turn quickly to the coming Christmas holiday. I will tell you a secret. I don’t really like decorating for Christmas. I have a large space and it is full of books and shelves and tables and adding even more stuff in there looks cluttered at times. Plus it only lasts for a couple of weeks, so it seems like a waste of time.

HOWEVER – I do decorate for the following reasons.

1. The children love to come in and see the Christmas decorations.
2. It makes the library look inviting and festive.
3. I have helpers to put it up and take it down!

I haven’t really started much decorating yet, but we will put our library tree (artificial) up today. And that brings me to my post for this week. I have a contest going. Students who wish to enter the contest can make an ornament for the library Christmas tree. They need to make or decorate an ornament that fits the theme of Books and Reading. Their ornament needs to have a tag with two things on the tag – the title of the book the ornament represents and the student’s full name. These ornaments are due next week and winners will be chosen from each grade level. The ornaments will be theirs to keep and they can take them home just before vacation.

Two years ago I did this same contest and got exactly 12 ornaments. All from grades 3 and under. My intention was to choose three from each wing which would have been 12 in all, so I just declared each of them winners. I gave them a gift certificate for a book from the Scholastic Book Fair that would come in the spring and one of our teachers who is a wonderful photographer took their pictures which we made into posters and put up on the empty wall above the stacks. All in all it was a success. This time I made the change to specify that the ornament must have a tag with the name of the book on it because one ornament looked like a bead string and I simply could not guess what book it was supposed to represent!

Wouldn’t this be a great idea for a classroom to do a book report ornament? They could make an ornament to represent the book they read, tell about it in class and then hang it on the tree. Or you could keep track of the books they read over the next few weeks. They can hang an ornament for each book they read.

Here are the posters we made and put on the wall. Each student is holding a favorite book similar to the posters that ALA Graphics puts out. These posters are 16 inches by 24 inches, so they really are fairly large, but look much smaller up high. Keep that in mind if you decide to do something like this.

Well, I need to go pull down my Christmas decorations and get started or the holiday (at school) will be over before I get going!

I hope you have a great week. Take your vitamins! You will need the energy.
Audrey