Circus, Circus!

I created the following circus display in the children's area of the public library I managed for 9 years. We didn't have a budget for displays, so I used whatever I had on hand at the library or could find at my house, with the exception of the beach balls, which I picked up at the dollar store. I wish I had better picture of the Big Top, but I strung crepe paper from the ceiling at the middle of the children's area to create the illusion of a circus tent.

I hung a couple of beach balls from the ceiling to make it look like the seals were playing with them and one was balancing it on his nose.

I made the seals from navy blue folders-- you can still see the creases where I unfolded them. I taped them to a book end to stand it up on the table.

I taped half-circles of two different colors of paper around the edges of the three round tables to give them the effect of performing platforms.  In the background, you can see some of the circus theme shelf markers sticking out of the bookshelves-- clown hands and an elephant's snoot. 

I displayed circus theme books on the tables.

Shelf markers - clown feet, a leopard's tail, and the elephant snoot.

More shelf markers: a tiger's paws and tail, and a lion's tail.

A different way to display the tiger paws and tail.

I love the challenge of coming up with creative displays on little or no budget. I've found some amazing things behind stores in town-- display racks, perfectly good materials, etc. You'd be surprised what you can come up with, and it's so much fun to see the children's faces when they come into the library and see an environment that gets them excited about reading.  

Caught You Reading



Nothing original here. Just happy to work in a school district where so many of the students love to read. I've enjoyed walking around catching students reading after their school work is done. I'm making mini-posters and putting them all around school with the title Caught You Reading! and Teen Read Week October 17-23 as captions. The students love to have their photo taken, but if you put them up on a Web site, make sure the parents have given permission for their child to have their picture online.



Fall into Books

        I bought a beautiful throw a while back that had a wonderful saying, One hundred years from now... it won't matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove, but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child. -Forest E. Witcraft.
        And the woman and child are curled up in a big chair reading a book. Be still my heart. 

        The picture and colors look muted and old fashioned, so I went with that look, pulling in a quilted bear in wicker chair, a star-shaped crocheted table cover (both the bear and the crocheted piece were acquired from someone's trash down the road from my house), a decorative wrought iron mirror and candle holder, and baskets. I took apart a former tree made of twisted brown paper and wove the strands in and out of the loft bed top for no particular reason other than to soften the metal look. I used some leftover scavenged hardwood flooring planks and stood them up along the back like a wooden fence and held them in place with a folded cardboard packing strip. Hope I can find more of those planks-- I love that effect. 



       I pulled books that looked historical or old fashioned. If you look closely at the mirror, I faced two books backwards so you could see the faces on the covers in the reflection. Also caught a student's leg as they passed by outside.

My goal is to not repeat any displays for three years so students will see a different display every month. But I definitely hang onto everything and recycle and re-use them in different ways.

Happy Fall Reading!





Lights, Camera, Action!

Our principal came up with a wonderful theme for our campus inservice week before school, and I like to create the first display to coordinate with that, so my daughter helped me make a movie marquee:

Ninety-nine per cent of the time when someone has read a book and then watched the movie made from it, they tell me, "The book was better," so that's where the movie title came from. The grid and white background was very easy to make-- the original one is simply a white sheet of copy paper with two horizontal lines on it that I printed off 18 sheets to go all the way around three sides of the loft bed. I just mounted them side-by-side with about a quarter inch space between them, which creates the vertical line in the grid. The marquee grid is 11 inches-- the height of copy paper. I used the alphabet die cutters for the letters, so it was easy and quick to do.

I lined the loft bed frame with black posterboard paper; my daughter helped me cut out lots of circles for the  lights surrounding actual movie posters and marquee. The yellow ones were glued together in groups of threes and spaces between to give the appearance of blinking lights. I hung an actual projector screen inside the loft bed, and I wanted to show silhouettes of students reading books, but I ran out of time. The back of the loft bed has two other movie posters with the white lights surrounding them like the Twilight poster.

I pulled books that had been made into movies and encouraged the students to read them and see which they liked better: the movie or the book. The second shelf was also full, but a lot of them had been checked out by the time I took the picture. I'm sure there are more books in the shelves I can add to the cart. They definitely grabbed students' attention. 

Fantasy: Unbridled Fancy

The library window display for last month was fantasy, which one definition described it as unrestrained fancy. The Texan in me changed it to 'unbridled' fancy. I tried to unbridle my own mind and not think too hard about what I would include in the display other than using what materials I had on hand and trying to make it magical-looking or whatever strikes my fancy. It looks busy and cluttered-- not to be taken in and understood with a quick glance. There are layers and enigmas and oddities about it, much like fantasy stories.

So I used styrofoam packing materials, a lot of large rubber bands I've collected from our newspapers, window frames, vines created from twisted strips of bulletin board paper, a yellow brick road on the rubber mats from AV carts, and a lot of fantasy books to display including Frank L. Baum's Oz books (and there are more than just The Wizard of Oz), Kathryn Lasky's Guardian of Ga'hoole books, Tony Abbott's Secrets of Droon books, Erin Hunter's the Warriors books and other authors' books such as Tolkien, Potter, Barron, Lewis, and a number of others.

A book that is considered a fantasy has magical elements in it-- something that couldn't necessarily happen in real life-- talking animals, flying brooms, mythical creatures like dragons or ogres, inanimate objects coming to life, etc. Fantasy stories can take place in the distant past or future, or even a contemporary or present setting.

Often fantasy and science fiction are grouped together, but there are differences between them. Sci-fi usually takes place in the future and could potentially happen when technology catches up with the story. Often sci-fi writers are in the science or medical fields and can draw on their knowledge and backgrounds to come up with believable plots. With sci-fi and fantasy both, if the story has extraordinary technology and magical elements, it still has to ring true somehow or the reader won't commit to it.

"Scales" by Vanessa Roeder, Used with permission

www.nessadeeart.blogspot.com

Some of the most prolific readers in my middle school are fantasy readers. The library has a large collection of fantasy books, and many of them are in series, which students love because the stories and the characters they've become attached to don't end after one book.

The Quilt System

The February display tells the story of how people used quilts to send messages to the runaway slaves traversing the Underground Railroad. For the sign, I used MS Word and went to the Insert tab, Clip Art, and searched each letter individually to create a quilt square look for each letter.

I brought two colorful quilts from home to use as the background and draped on a chair, as well as some quilted placemats and a table runner. I brought out all of the cloth from the supply room and filled every basket I had on hand to make it look like a sewing room.

I pulled books about slavery and the Underground Railroad to display.