Library Club

Hello,

It’s been a while since I sent a post about using student helpers in your library. Most of us are very busy and many of you have small schools or very little help in the library so I knew that we could all benefit from student helpers. It may be that you are already benefitting from student help in your classrooms.

Due to a change in schedules about twelve years ago here at Rogers, I knew that I would be losing some of my help in the library. I did a little research and found that many schools have a Library Club of some kind. I saw elementary students through high school students helping in their school libraries and decided to try it. Here we are in our 13th year with Library Club.

This is a service club. In looking at my schedule, I realized that the best time for me to have students come in to help would be from 11:30 – 11:50. This happens to be lunch recess for our 5th and 6th graders, so that is the group that I started working with. I would like to use 7th and 8th graders, but the timing just doesn’t work at our school.

At first I advertised by mentioning it in library class periods, but I don’t do that any longer. I don’t need to. Students who want to be in Library Club come and ask me about it at the beginning of the school year. Students who were in the club last year come and ask when Library Club starts. They are my commercials for this. I used to have an application form for the students to fill out including a parent signature and a teacher signature, but this year I decided to see what would happen if we just started and didn’t worry about all that. The main thing is that the teacher knows where the students are when they come here to work. Students do need to keep up with their schoolwork in order to stay in Library Club.

I have found that my limit of Library Club members is right around the dozen mark. I really can’t manage more than that easily. If that many are all in the library at the same time, it tends to gravitate toward chaos rather than help.

I ask students to come at least twice a week during their lunch recess, but some of them come every day. The students receive training in shelving books and we can keep up with all the books that are returned each week. They come all week when we are having a book fair and they help with that. They also learn to straighten the shelves, ‘read’ the shelves, and keep the magazines, DVDs, and all other materials in order.
Library Club members receive some little perks such as coming to have lunch in the library once each week, free books at book fair time and Christmas, occasional treats, and a special party at the end of the school year.

This system might work for you, too. Think about it and see if you can train a few students to help you with your work.
Have a great week!
Audrey