Promoting State Book Awards

The South Carolina Association of School Librarians sponsors a book award program. The program consists of Children's Books, Picture Books, Junior Books and Young Adult Book categories. While we often have titles on the Children's and YA book list in our collection we focus on the Junior Books at the middle school level.

The past two years we have asked our county voting commission to bring voting booths in for our students to cast the vote for their favorite. The students really enjoy voting this way and we even got a little media attention. They are always happy to come because it promotes their mission as well as making a fun event for our students.

Our book award committees put together an activity guide and brochure each year that is shared with SCASL members only (a perk of membership). Last year they created booktalks for each title. I put them on our school iPods and used with my students. I visited our feeder schools and allowed the 5th graders to listen to the booktalks and we talked about the titles and our book club. They were really excited about library events and even though it was a year ago those kids still talk about that visit. One of our members created a Prezi of the titles, another created a Powerpoint that included the book covers and a short description of the books, I created a Glog of the titles including the booktalks, and Kristen Hearne and I created QR codes to be placed on each book that led to the author site or another related page.

This year I hope to duplicate these activities, but in addition Kristen Hearne, Monique German and I are working on two new projects. One project is to pair each book with a nonfiction title, website and book trailer if available. We shared the link to the Google Doc on our listserv in the hopes that others will contribute to the list. The second project is a total rip off from Cathy Jo Nelson. We are using Wordle and Powerpoint to create slides for each title that we can advertise on our digital frames or on a bulletin board.

I created the image above and a series of collages that I use to put into my picture frame mousepads (just $1.50). Feel free to snag those from Flickr and use as you wish. I'm going to really miss Picnik.

What types of activities or promotions do you use for your state book awards? I would love to add to my list.