I can’t believe how little blogging I’ve done this spring, but sometimes life gets in the way. Even with busy plans for summer, I’m hoping to get back to it more in the next couple of months, especially since I have lots of books to talk about.
Because the end of the school year is at hand this week, I’ve been working on inventory and weeding of my classroom library. As I was working on that, I was looking over the checkout reports and noticing that some books were checked out much more often than others, which is always a good thing to note. I always find it interesting to see how each year’s class can have such a different personality when it comes to the most popular books each year. This is especially evident in the impact of author visits – last year’s class had a visit from Lisa McMann and the Visions series, along with her standalone titles, were very popular with the whole group. This year’s class had a visit from Jason Reynolds and a writer-in-residence three day writing workshop with Kevin Emerson, and they each got to choose one of his books, hence the extra popularity of three of his books. Visiting in person makes a difference in getting students excited about reading their books.
(perhaps the movie release had something to do with this also)
And a completely different list from my school, except for Sisters! It is funny how classes do have personalities. For me, it really helps diversify my library. This year I added a lot of much younger titles. Your students like a lot more YA than mine do. Thanks for sharing.