Tales from a Loud Librarian

Motto for Mock BOB: May the Best Book Win! It did:  Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell We started the Mock BOB at PFTSTA on March 10th. It took a month to get through 15 battles in four rounds. In Round 1 , there were eight battles that were fought live during lunch in the commons area. Students stood up to speak as a champion for their book. For Round 2 and 3, the students picked their selections online. In Round 2 , the champions wrote a brief pitch for their book, but in Round 3 , the champions created a brief video. The events brought some excitement to the library and with multiple copies of the original sixteen books, students eager to read the books that their friends were defending could check them out and read throughout the month of battles. Championing Far Far Away Going to Bat for The Thing about Luck Middle School Students Listen Attentively More Words for Far Far Away Since this was the end of a long process, we decided tha...

The students and I created a video to share their take on the four books in Round 3 of our Mock BOB. The books left in the battle were: All the Truth that's in Me by Julie Berry, Far Far Away by Tom McNeal, Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgewick and The Thing about Luck by Cynthia Kadohata. The voting ends on Monday afternoon. Open here to find the video on the PFTSTA Library website . We know that SLJ finished the BOB last week , but it took us some time to get all the champions rounded up to record. The winning books will be announced on Tuesday. 

School Library Journa l has kept up a prolific online presence with the Battle of the Kids Books through blog posts, online articles, twitter, etc. Read this online article to see one of my student's picture prominently displayed and find out more about PFTSTA's participation in the Mock BOB .  The students had about four days to ponder and decide how they would vote in Round 2 of our ongoing Mock BOB. The hardest battle was the choice between Eleanor and Park and Far Far Away . Open here to see what the SLJ author judge had to say about this battle.   I used Survey Monkey to collect the votes. The free version only allows one hundred respondents. I was hoping to have close to that. We only have 350 students in our school so that would have been a nice percentage of students. Unfortunately, I only had fifty-five voters, and that is only 16% of the school. Maybe I can figure out a way to drum up more votes in Round 3. We are going to do that one online too, but I am ...

Today, I sent the students a link to the Survey Monkey with the pictures that you see below to help them in their quest for the best of the books in Round 2. The students who defended the books in Round 1 gave me the blurbs to add to the pictures below. Just click on each picture to enlarge it to read what the students had to say. I think the students did a phenomenal job. They gave just the right kind of info to try and sway their classmates to select their book as a winner. The poll will stay open until Monday the 24th. I will let you know the school's selections next week. I will also add the a link to the SLJ author judge decisions after they are posted next week.  For Battle 1 of Round 2, our selections at PFTSTA did not match the selections of SLJ's author judges. Tonya Bolden was given the task by SLJ for picking the best of two non-fiction works: The Animal Book and Boxers and Saints . Though our student presenters of those books loved the...

The week began with our final battles in Round 1. Since Monday is the day for the weekly scheduled meeting of the high school book group (Bookmarked), everyone was there for these battles. Up first, was one of my favorites of 2013, Rose Under Fire . I know that historical fiction is a hard sell to my students, but Alexandra and Kayla who read this work seemed to love it as much as I did. The strong female characters and the different picture that the book paints of the Holocaust resonated with them. Unfortunately, it could not manage to defeat The Thing about Luck . Darla stepped up with a script in hand so she wouldn't forget anything and described the story about a girl of Japanese descent working as a migrant farm worker with her family  That the protagonist feels good luck just seems to evade their family time and time again spoke to the students. I guess they could feel her pain. Twice as many students selected Kadohata's work over Wein's. Author judge...