Banned Books Week Plans 2017

Fighting censorship is one of our core values as librarians, which makes celebrating and recognizing Banned Books Week so important.

This year I put together a hyperdoc of activities for the day. I have 8 classes scheduled to come in that week and participate. I'll write a post to share how it goes, but I wanted to share this so that others might be able to use it in their schools.

Make a copy of the hyperdoc here.


Some of the stations require some set up so be sure to check each of them before doing the lesson.

1. Reaching Challenged Books: Risk Vs Reward: After watching the video, students will complete the T Chart listing risks and rewards of reading controversial books. You can print these on paper or share digitally using Google Classroom if you prefer.

2. I'm With the Banned: I purchased a green screen kit, but this could easily be replicated with a green (or solid color) wall, poster paper or even a background you create and skip the green screen component. I printed copies of these instructions using Chromakey in Keynote since our students have iPads. I also provided graphics from the ALA website for them to use as their background. You will want to have copies of challenged books or printed covers of challenged books for students to pose with.

3. Defend the First Amendment: This year's theme focuses on the 1st Amendment so I wanted something that linked the Constitution to the activities. Matt Miller shared this great activity on his blog so I tweaked it to be a Founding Fathers tweet. You'll want to make a copy of this document and share with the students either in the hyperdoc, on Google Classroom or even a printed version with a few different Founding Father pics.

4. I'll See You in Court: You can use this Right to Read Quiz I created on Quizziz. You'll need to go to the Quizziz site and assign the quiz as homework to get a code to enter onto your hyperdoc and share with students. You can only do this about 14 days ahead of time. I printed a few copies of the court case handout to place at this station so they could refer to it without toggling between the handout and the quiz.

5. Infographics Quiz: I printed these infographics (2016, 2015) from the ALA site in large poster size to have at this station. You'll want to make a copy of the Google Quiz for your class.

6. What Are Your Favorite Books?: I printed the 2016 Social Media prompts from ALA after seeing them shared on the Future Ready Librarians Facebook page. Students will answer with post it notes for as many of these prompts as possible. They look like this if you have a difficult time finding them.


7. What Do You Think?: Because my new favorite tool is Flipgrid, I had to put a Flipgrid response station in there. You'll need to create an account if you don't already have one and set up the Flipgrid topic. This is what I asked: After learning about Banned Books Week and completing these activities, why do you believe that we celebrate Banned Books Week? Why is the freedom to read important?

8. Share Your Work: For the final station I created a Google Drive folder, linked it on the active hyperdoc and asked students to put their green screen photos and T charts into the folder so that I can share a few favorites on social media.

I hope this hyperdoc is useful to you. If you run into problems recreating it or have questions send me a tweet or message on Twitter. @coxtl