Book Ambassadors Assemble!

About a month ago, one of my book vendor reps, J'aimie Quick, asked me and a few other SBISD librarians to help pilot a Book Ambassador program. After watching a video from Andy Plemmons, I quickly said YES!

I surveyed my teachers for worthy candidates and met with my team of ten, 4 third graders and 6 fourth graders, to discuss their responsibilities. We worked on a school library survey to get input from all the grade levels. Their first task is to choose books from Capstone to spend my Bonus Rewards. Then next year they can choose to stay on the team and help use some of our library budget money to purchase books to fill gaps in our Fiction and Everybody sections. These kids were super excited, and gave up their recess time to help the Kindergarten and First grade students fill out the survey over several weeks.

Today we met to start the book selection process.

First they looked over the survey results to decide what kinds of books students wanted more of for our library. 

Our top categories were:

1. Graphic Novels and Comics (Superheroes)
2. Animals
3. Drawing (and origami)
4. Scary (and zombies)
5. Fairy Tales
6. Sports

Then they got to look through some sample titles from Capstone. (We had a couple of third graders visiting the library before the team arrived who migrated to the tables to take a look as well. Let's just say the superhero books were quite popular!)

 Then they each sat with several books from a category to decide if the book would be a good fit.

Before they left our session, they each had to pick a book they felt was a "MUST HAVE" book from the table. Here are a few of their opinions:

Then they got to look at all Capstone has to offer in their catalog! So many books were circled and pages marked! Each student was tasked with picking 10-12 books that matched our categories from the survey. I can't wait until our meeting next week when we start to build our ordering list!