This year's theme was "Reading Madness". Each day we had a dress up theme tied into sports. Since the NCAA playoffs always have a bracket, we wanted to have a book bracket. We wanted all students in the entire school to experience the same books each day, and we chose to do this through a competition of picture book read alouds.
Several weeks ago I went to the public library and spent a couple hours reading sports themed picture books. We also wanted the books to show diverse characters, so I needed to call on some help. I contacted my Twitter friend @ajhueySTL and she gave me some great suggestions. I chose the books we were going to use, and then I started reserving as many books as I could through our public library system. They were great to work with, and they made my job so much easier. We were able to check out one copy of each book for the grade level partners to share.
Each morning the books of the day were announced during our school-wide morning assembly. I gave a very short book buzz to give the kids and teachers a quick background. It also helped that our committee leader came dressed up as something crazy that went along with the books. The teachers read the books during the day, and they had the kids vote on their favorite. We used Google Forms to collect student votes and add up totals.
The next day I'd rev up the crowd during morning assembly and announce yesterday's winner. It was so exciting for the kids and teachers. Winning books went head-to-head in order to choose the final two. We had a hectic round of voting on the last day to choose the winner. The video below shows the excitement from our kids when the winning book was finally announced at our Pep Assembly. The cheering and excitement continued even after I stopped filming.
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