As I’m writing this, I’m realizing this is my third post about something I did in my LRC. I promise I actually do things in my building that require me to actually leave the LRC!!
Over the past couple years, I’ve been wanting to build more engagement for our students while they visit the LRC for their weekly book check-out. It was starting to feel monotonous for them and the teachers. They would come in, check out their book, and then just sit at a table waiting for their whole class to be done.
I wanted to do something that would be fun for our students, but also didn’t require much involvement from our teachers since they were also helping students find books they wanted around the library. After trying a few things that weren’t quite a hit, I finally found an idea that everyone seemed to love: informational text raffles!
Based off of different reading standards that were currently being taught around the school, I would create different challenges for the students to try and complete after they were done checking out their new books. When students completed their challenge, they were able to fill out a raffle ticket for a prize! Each challenge lasted for about a month and our secretary would then pull a winner on the morning announcements on the last day!
Our first challenge just happened to be around our fall book fair time, so we gave away gift certificates for it. The informational reading standards have been an area that we have been working on as a school fr a while so I centered the first challenge all around text features. It’s familiar to most of our kids and would be easy to create some excitement around it.
Off to the side was a display of various informational text books that they could choose from to complete their challenge. They had to flip through the book and identify two different text features and why they were useful. Then they had to quickly create their own text feature that could be added to the book. That’s it!
Like I’ve mentioned multiple times, the teachers in my building are incredible and helped build the excitement every time they came through with their classes!
Another challenge I created included some sketchnoting. Students had to choose another informational book and read a small section. When they were done, they had to sketch a quick picture and then write three words to describe their drawing. Again, teachers would quickly check it, then they got a raffle ticket to put in the bucket!
One of my favorite prizes to raffle off was this movie basket. It was all put together from donations from our teachers and the kids LOVED this one!
Hope this inspires you to do something similar in your school; if you do, I’d love to hear how it went!! Feel free to email me, if you need any support!
Windy City Literacy 