Greensleeves

There's a science project goin' on in these here parts, and it's a science free read.  The Subbie group can read any non-fiction science book they want, so that gave Amy and me lots of room to pull cool books for book talks, displays, and a book cart. 

The students can find books in one of three ways: look on the shelves, look on a designated cart in the main room of the library, or seek help from Amy, Paul, or myself for a reference interview.  Amy requested a lot of texts from other libraries on campus, and then she asked me to go into our own collection and seek out interesting titles to face out on the shelves.  This was more fun than I thought it would be.  Here's me being totally honest: I didn't know how many interesting science books there are!*

Three of my favorite science books I pulled, covering three of my favorite topics: Harry Potter, time travel, and Buffy.

Amy started the collection for the Subbies to peruse, Paul processed all of the books and created "temporary" statuses for them, so they're properly acknowledged in the online catalog, and I, well, I had the GREENSLEEVES FACE OUT idea. 

We've put greensleeves on each of the books for the Subbies, and then for each shelf in our collection, I picked one or two texts to cover with a sleeve and do a face out.  We cannot cover each and every non-fiction science text in our collection, but I pulled several I thought were super interesting to do as face outs.  These sleeves draw the students' eyes, and if they like the subject/topic, but not that specific book, they can look down the shelf to find a book with a similar topic.  I will admit that I was proud of my idea, and it has worked.  Students were much more confident looking on the shelves knowing that there would be suggested face outs.  In fact, it worked so well that Amy, Paul, and I only did a few reference interviews. 

This is just another example of collaboration, and how a simple thing like a colored piece of paper can make all the difference in the world for a student to gain confidence in the library.




*CONFESSION TIME...I am not a great scientist: Science is my worst subject on Trivia Crack, and I wanted to enroll our daughter into a STEM school, so she would be sure to have a lot of science instruction in elementary school.  (When I was in elementary school, science was always THE LAST subject my teachers made room to teach.)