Tag Archives: book budget

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Students and Vendors: Meeting with Avid Bookshop

avid book budget (5)

Our book budget students have continued to meet with vendors to spend our $5,000 James Patterson Partnership grant.  They have gone through a long process to create a survey, survey students, analyze data, set goals, and meet with vendors to create consideration lists.  They met with Jim Boon of Capstone Press and Gret Hechenbleikner of Gumdrop books.  Students have just finished meeting with their final vendor, Avid Bookshop.

avid book budget (9)

We love working with our local independent bookshop.  They are always willing to come into the school or Skype in to share books with us for projects.  Will Walton, author and bookseller, came in to do book talks with our 3 small groups of book budget students.  Each grade comes in separately for 30 minutes, and each group picks up where the previous group left off.

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We pulled up our goals on the screen so that Will could use them as a talking point with students.  He brought some Advance Reader Copies of books that might meet our goals but also offered his own knowledge of books that matched many of our goals such as graphic novels, scary, and humorous stories.  As Will talked, I was in charge of creating a Google doc of the books so that students could look back at them later.

One of the things that I absolutely loved as Will was talking was how our students were getting hooked on the books he was talking about.  There was an immediate trust of Will, and several students found a book that they personally wanted to read.  He graciously handed out some the ARCs and told students to read them and pass them on to someone else.  He also encouraged students to come in and visit Avid Bookshop.  Several requested that he write down the address of the shop since they had never actually been inside.

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Will also started thinking of certain authors and series and going onto the shelves of our library to find them.  He handed out several of our own books and students checked them out to read.  He really reminded me of the importance of book talks and how I really need to be doing this more than I am!

After Will left, we continued to work on our Avid list.  I email it to Janet Geddis and the Avid team.  They will now check the list to make sure all of the titles are available, and they will send us a quote to help us narrow down our list to what we will actually purchase.  Students have two more meetings before the holidays, so we  hope we can fine tune all 3 of our lists to match our $5,000 budget.

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Students and Vendors: Meeting with Gumdrop Books

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Our student book budget team is still hard at work compiling consideration lists to match their goals.  Today, they met as grade levels with Gret Hechenbleikner from Gumdrop Books.  This year, we are using 3 vendors for our purchasing.  Students already met with Jim Boon from Capstone Press, and they will meet with Will Walton from Avid Bookshop later this week.

Our process with Gumdrop was slightly different than Capstone since Gumdrop doesn’t have a scan to cart feature or a catalog.  Instead, Gret brings a selection of books for students to look at.  Inside each book, she has list of the other books that are found in that same series.  Students can get a taste for what the book looks and feels like and consider whether they might like other books in that same series.  Gret brought multiple books that matched the goals that students had set based on our survey data.  I sent these goals to her a couple of weeks in advance.

Gret did a quick intro of what she had brought and told students about the lists inside each book.  She setup her computer and printer at a table and students started looking at all of the books.  She and I both walked around and talked with students about what they were looking at and asked them to consider whether or not students at our school would enjoy the book they were looking at.  When students found a book or set of books they wanted to add to our consideration list, they took it to Gret at her computer.  She was able to pull up the complete series on her computer, check to see if we already had the book in our collection, and add it or a set of books to our consideration list.  When books came up that we already had, Gret and I asked them to think about whether we might need an additional copy.  Most of the time students said no, but they did decide to add another Frozen drawing book to our list.

Every 30 minutes a new group of students came to meet with Gret.  We even had a few random students who dropped by the library to check out books who offered their own feedback.  When all students were done, Gret printed a master list for us to talk about when we meet our budget.  She will also email me a PDF of the list that I can manipulate.

I always love this process of meeting with vendors because I put all of my trust in the students.  Even when a vendor may ask me about things I want to add to the collection, I remind them that this is completely up to the students.  I’ll do my purchasing with other money and other lists.

Students have quite a job to do next week.  We currently have 2 different lists which total more than $3,000 each and we have one more vendor to meet with.  Our $5,000 budget, which is a grant through the James Patterson Partnership, will definitely not be enough to purchase all that they want, so some tough decisions will have to be made.  This is all an important part of the process.

 

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Unpacking Our Student Book Budget Books: Part 1

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Two parts of our 2015 student book budget arrived!  It’s always exciting when I can email the students and tell them that the books are here.  They’ve been asking me almost daily since we placed the order.

All of our books from Avid Bookshop arrived during our author visit with Sarah Weeks.  The first box of Capstone books arrived while our 5th graders were at Skidaway Island.  I emailed the whole book budget group and told them to come today at noon to unpack books.

Our timeline has been a bit crunched this year.  We are almost out of school days and book check out is already coming to an end for the school year.  I need to do a better job next year of making sure this project doesn’t slip too far into the year.  Usually, we put all of the books out when they arrive and let the students start checking them out.  However, with only 8 days of school remaining, I handed this dilemma to the group.  There was a lot of debate about whether or not to have a special checkout of just book budget books or to wait until the opening of the library in the fall.  After a lot of discussion, the students decided that they wanted to wait and have these books be the first new books available to students in the fall.  It’s always nice to start the new school year with some exciting new books.

As we unpacked the books, we checked them off of our packing slips.  I had already cataloged the Avid books and uploaded the MARC records for Capstone, so the books were ready to go into circulation.  Once they were checked off the list.  Capstone sent us some special labels to put inside our books so that students could indicate books that they chose for the order.

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Each student chose a label, wrote his or her name on the label, and added it to the inside cover.  Students also stamped the books with our library stamp.

The excitement was high and it was so much fun to see the students immediately diving into the books.  They all tucked away around the library to read by themselves or with a partner.  Before they left, the book budget students did get to checkout a few of the books to read over the next few days.  They will return these books to the boxes so that they are ready for the next school year.

We are eagerly awaiting our final order from Capstone which should be arriving in the next few days.

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2015 Student Book Budgets Step Two: Goal Setting

Discussion

The students in this year’s book budget group have been busy.  We emailed our reading interest survey to all students in our upper grades, but our younger students needed to be surveyed in person.  The book budget crew have carried iPads to recess and lunch as well as picked up iPads before school to survey students.  Over the course of a few days, they have surveyed almost half of our school.

All along the way we have checked the progress in our form by viewing the summary of responses and seeing which grades needed to be surveyed.  We wanted there to be voices from every grade level on the survey.

Finally, we all met in the library for an official meeting to look at the data on the survey.

Discussion

First, the students started picking out the kinds of books that received the most votes.  They made a list of 11 kinds of books.  These books were the ones that received above 60% of the people surveyed who said they liked that kind of book.

Our Goals

The students decided that they wanted to keep this list of 11, so our next step was to decide how to divide our approximate budget of $2000 among the 11 goals.

This came with some controversy.  There were lots of ideas.  We decided to make a list of our ideas on our shared Google doc.  Four main ideas came to the surface.

Voting on Budget Plan

1.  Divide the money equally among the 11 goals.

2.  Create a stair step budget or waterfall budget where the top goal on the list got the most money and the last goal on the list got the least.

3.  Narrow the list of goals to a top 10 or top 5.

4.  Focus on different kinds of books for different grade levels based on the survey responsed.

 

The students voted on these ideas by putting tallies in a table on the Google doc.  The idea of a waterfall budget won the vote, so the next step was to start thinking about how to divide the money among the goals while giving more money to goals requested by more students.  This was even trickier, and we ended up not making a final decision yet.

Voting on Goal Plan

 

 

Deciding how to divide the budget really called upon the students’ math skills.  They wrote things on paper, Google docs, and used Google chrome as a calculator to try to add up various amounts to get to $2000 and divide the budget up into multiple categories.  Students were using their problem solving and reasoning skills as they discussed in groups why their various plans worked or didn’t work.  Some were even revisiting the survey data to try to look at percentages on the survey and correlating that to budget percentages.  Math wasn’t just a subject at this moment.  It was a real life skill that was being put into action.

https://twitter.com/capstonepress/status/587723785379250176

Our process was again loud and messy, but I loved how the Google doc allowed us to get lots of voices represented in the conversation rather than hearing from one or two people speaking aloud.

Now that our goals have been decided, we’ve sent these to Avid Bookshop and Capstone Press.  Will from Avid Bookshop will visit the students to book talk some books from Avid that match our goals and Jim Boon from Capstone will share his company’s offerings.  I think the pairing of these two vendors will get the students a great variety of titles to choose from.

I can’t wait to see what they decide.

 

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Honoring Student Voices through Student Book Budgets with Capstone Press

Student Book Survey 2013 2014For the past several years, I have reserved a portion of our library funding to be completely controlled by students.  Over time, I’ve seen student-selected books be among some of the most popular books in the collection.  The library collection is mainly for our students, so why not let their voice be heard in the collection development process.  Part of our library funding comes from the state, and another part comes from fundraisers such as our fall and spring book fair.  Since students and their families shop at our book fairs to build their home libraries while supporting our school library, I see student book budgets as being one small way of giving back to our community.

This year, our book budget process has gone through some changes.  In order to involve a few more students at various stages, I broke the process into parts.  Part 1 was to gather data from the school.  Every Tuesday and Thursday I have a group of five 5th grade boys who work in the library as a service project.  Together, we developed a Google form to gather information from the school.  We wanted to track the number of students we surveyed at each grade level, the number of boys and girls, specific reading interests, and specific requests.

Once the survey was created, we generated a QR code so that they could quickly scan the code and go out into the school to survey students with iPads.  This was mainly needed with our youngest students.  For older students, I emailed the survey to them to fill out.

Each year, we tend to see similar results with our data, but I told the students that we can’t assume that we know what people are wanting in the library because it can change.  Here’s a look at the main data they collected.

Student Book Survey 2013 2014 Google Drive

Next, I blocked off some library time during 4th and 5th grade’s recess time and asked for students who would like to participate in an alternative recess for a few days to spend money on books.  I’ve tried doing this during lunch and it is just too complicated to juggle food, catalogs, vendor websites, etc.  I didn’t get as big of a response from students this year, so we’ll see if we return to this model next year.

On day 1, the 4th and 5th grade book budget students came to look at the survey results.  They made some decisions to inform how much money should be dedicated to various categories.  I printed the specific requests of students and Savannah and Isaiah spent time highlighting some specific titles that students were asking for.  It was a tedious process for them!  The even got down to searching the library catalog to see how many copies of books we had like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and discussing if there was justification to order even more copies of existing titles.  We finally all agreed on some overall categories of:  Comics/Graphic novels, sports, humor, scary, world records, and action/adventure.

tough decisions

Even on this 1st day, they started having some tough conversation.  For example, they saw that World Records was a highly requested category, but from experience, they know that students are mostly talking about Guinness World Records.  They decided that instead of dividing the budget and giving this category several hundred dollars, they would just buy 2 new copies of the 2014 World Records for about $60.  It’s always fascinating to see how quickly students realize how a budget works and how hard it is to make decisions for the library.  One of them said, “Mr. Plemmons, I know this is only a small part of your job, but it sure is hard!”

jim boon capstone (2)

On day 2, we welcomed Jim Boon, Capstone Press Sales Rep.  I love working with Jim because he treats the students like young professionals.  I also love that Jim listens to what students are asking for and tailors his talk and display to the goals that they have.  He setup displays of books that matched their goal categories with a few books that connected to their themes in different ways.  He gave every student a new Capstone catalog and a pen.  As he proceeded to show students various books, he invited students to turn through the catalog, circle books of interest, and fold down the corners of pages.  After he shared some specific books, students came up and started browsing through the books on display.  Jim and I proceeded to have individual conversations with students about the books in the catalogs and help them see where prices could be found.  We also mentioned to students that Capstone offers Capstone Rewards and various incentives.  For example, if we spend $1750 on our order, we get 30% back in Capstone Rewards, but if we spend less than that we get 10% back.  I love the math that comes into this project each year because it is real world application of an important life skill.

I also love that in our individual conversations there are stories that emerge.  Jim had a great conversation with one of our students, Ember.  She consistently asked Jim about the prices of every book.  The budget was weighing heavy on her mind and she was thinking hard about how to get the most books for our money.  In their conversations, there were a few books that Ember desperately wanted in our collection, and I loved that Jim made sure to leave one of those books that she requested for us to add to our collection!  I know Ember will greatly appreciate it.

jim boon capstone (11)

Students were having so much fun that they decided to take their catalogs with them to continue marking titles of interest.  I’m a little scared of seeing what they come back with!  It’s such a hard process to cross books off of the wish list, but it is an important process to choose the very best books for our collection at the current time with the funds that we have.

jim boon capstone (13)

This process is beneficial to me as the librarian too because I get to see books that students are getting excited about.  For the purposes of the project, I remind students to focus on their goals and only purchase what matches the requests.  However, I’m over to the side writing down titles to put on my own ordering list for this year or the beginning of next year knowing that the titles already have a group of readers waiting on them.

Thank you to Capstone Press for your tremendous customer service, your professional relationship with all of your users including students, and for giving our students a voice in collection development.  You are superstars!

Our next step will be to look at one more vendor to fill in some holes in our wish list, and the we will start the tedious process of cutting books from our list until we have our final order.