Book reviews, School libraries
The theme for Book Week 2019 is Reading Is My Secret Power and there are so many ways you could interpret this theme for display ideas. Traditionally, I decorate our circulation desk window (four, large tinted windows that sit behind out prominent circulation desk) with some interpretation of the CBCA artwork. 
This year the CBCA Book Week 2019 artwork has been created by Bob Graham.
Here is my interpretation.
Alice in Wonderland provided an easy and very colourful concept for decorating our junior reading room.
The theme for Book Week 2019 is Reading Is My Secret Power and I have had a lot of fun coming up with different displays to showcase this theme around the library. For our junior reading room, I went with Bookopolis: Home of those with secret powers. It takes the angle of superheroes, something that is eternally popular with our young readers, especially with the release of the Marvel Avengers: The Endgame movie earlier in the year. The display is bright and was very easy to put together.
National Careers Week is celebrated in Australia in the second week of May. This year our school has a new Careers Guidance Counsellor (who is awesome) and she approached me about celebrating National Careers Week in the library. What a fantastic opportunity to connect literature and the skills we learn in the library to the workforce and students’ futures. Working together, we created a range of displays and activities to engage the students, from Junior right through to Senior, in discussing careers.
As part of our focus on genres this year, this interactive, walkable genre quiz display was placed at the front of the library leading to our young adult fiction collection to increase student engagement with the collection and new genre-sorted layout.
Love the Wheel of Fortune TV show? Well, I love interactive book displays and I thought these two elements would be a perfect match. My focus this year has been on promoting our library genres and this wheel of reading was a great way to get kids talking about the different genres they might like to read from. They also loved spinning the wheel – so much so, that I had to make quick repairs mid-way through the week.
Teen Tech Week is an initiative of American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association. While this is a US-based week of celebration, the concept and idea behind it is something I whole-heartedly support and think it is worthwhile celebrating in any library.
In 2019 The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle will celebrate 50 years in print. To celebrate we decided to turn the Very Hungry Caterpillar day (March 20th) into a gigantic birthday celebration.
For years now, our Junior Reading Room has hosted a giant Hungry Caterpillar poster, created by the students many years ago. It is a much-loved favourite of our Head of Library Services and so it has held pride of place in the Reading Room. So, I decided to design and place the Very Hungry Caterpillar 50 Years display around this old poster.
The giant hanging leaf is a new addition to the reading room, purchased from Ikea, and it fit nicely into the display.
With a lot of help from our awesome student library helpers, we made 3D fruit for the Caterpillar to munch on, thanks to Mr Printables for the awesome templates. All the needed fruit is available in the free downloadable pack, we just had to colour the oranges orange to transform them from lemons. We also used these 3D fruits to create headbands to wear throughout the week (any excuse to dress up). We just hot-glued the fruit to a plastic headband.
Our handy Cricut cutting machine cut lots of coloured dots, which we strung together to add brightness to the area. (These could also be used for a Roald Dahl display, as it kind of looked like Willy Wonka had thrown a party with all the colour). A 3D caterpillar was made with styrofoam balls, green and red paint, a purple straw, goggly eyes and more hot glue.
As well as dressing up throughout the week of celebrations, we also ran a Hungry Hunt. Students had to find the fruit cutouts hidden around the library and write down the secret clue hidden with each piece of fruit. Their answers went into the draw to win this awesome prize pack – thanks to Penguin Australia for previous supplying us with Hungry Caterpillar Posters, which were both included in the prize pack and included in the display.
The theme for Book Week 2019 is Reading Is My Secret Power.
The theme and official artwork offers plenty of inspiration for displays: powers, superpowers, secrets, transformations, hidden identities.
There are plenty of ideas surrounding “Reading is my superpower”, so I am planning to use those ideas and adapt them for a fresh Book Week look.
The Storey Treehouse series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton is a huge favourite with our young library readers. We have numerous copies of each of the, currently, eight books in the series and they are usually all on loan.
This display is to help readers who love the Storey Treehouse series find some similar titles to enjoy.
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