Tag Archives: decision-making

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Student Book Budgets 2015-16: The Final Lists

 

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Since early November, a group of 30 students has been hard at work spending a student book budget.  This year’s budget was funded through a generous grant from James Patterson.  Students created a survey in Google forms, surveyed the school, analyzed the results, set goals, met with vendors, and created consideration lists.

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You can read more about their work in these posts:

Getting started

Meeting with Capstone

Meeting with Gumdrop

Meeting with Avid

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Over the past week, students have worked to narrow those consideration lists down until they had books that met our goals and were within our budget.  There were many tough decisions as usual.  Students had to consider how many of each kind of book to order.  Should we order more superhero books than anything else?  Should we order copies of books that we already have in the collection?  Should we include books that we knew students would like but didn’t actually meet one of the goals we set in the beginning?  Should we spend more money with a certain vendor in order to earn additional free books?  As usual, I saw students go to bat for a book because of something they heard other students ask for.  For example, there was a Frozen drawing book with Gumdrop Books.  One of the 5th grade boys said, “I don’t personally like Frozen, but I know a lot of students who do.  I think we should order another copy of this book so that more students can enjoy it.”  I’m always amazed by the conversations that surface during this project.

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After cutting books from the list, I sent the student choices to Avid Bookshop, Capstone, and Gumdrop books to give us final quotes.  They each emailed me a final list for students to see.  Students met for one final time before the holidays to give a stamp of approval to the final lists.  There were a few minor changes to the lists in the end.  We added an additional Wimpy Kid book and some additional books in series.

Now, all of the lists have been sent to the vendors.  We met our goal of finishing before the holidays and students spent the entire $5,000 James Patterson Grant and managed to stretch that budget to an additional $750 thanks to Capstone Rewards.  Now we wait.  The books should arrive in January.  At that time, we’ll meet again to unpack the books, market them to the school, and enjoy a first look and checkout before the rest of the school.

Capstone List

Gumdrop List

Avid List

Great work student book budget team!

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Student Book Budgets 2012-2013 (Part 2)

The lists are done and the orders are placed!  Twenty-seven 3rd-5th graders have worked very hard during their lunch time for the past week to create lists of books that are grounded in the results of their school-wide reading interest survey data.  Rather than type everything out here, I’ve made a screencast that shows you the survey, the data, the focus categories, and the final lists.  I invite you to listen:

I’m very proud of these students.  Although, doing this during lunch across multiple times and groups of students was literally and figuratively very messy, I liked the overall results.  As always, some amazing moments happened along the way like:

  •  A student standing up and telling the whole group not to think of themselves.  That they needed to keep in mind all of the students of the school.
  • A male student taking a stand for princess books being on the list because he personally heard from multiple students who desperately wanted more of those books in the library.
  • A group of 3 fifth graders debating whether or not to cut a graphic novel off of the list because it cost $26.00.  They talked for 15 minutes just about that one book.  They read reviews, considered popularity, examined quality, and checked circulation statistics for other books in that series.  (They decided to keep it on the list!)
  • Several students repeatedly went into Destiny to search for how many books we had in particular categories, which books were lost in a particular series, and how many copies we had of certain books like Wimpy Kid.

I’m thankful for Capstone Rewards, too, because I helped out some of our tough decisions by using $500 of free book credit to bump up our budget from $1200 to $1700.  Even with that bump, some very tough decisions were made to cut books that would have been equally as popular.  I look forward to seeing what this group comes up with to market these books to the school and how fast they get checked out!

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Book Choice Champions Final Steps

The Book Choice Champions, a group of 11 boys in 2nd-5th grades, finalized their project today.  Their job has been to use a budget of $1500 to purchase books for the media center that are about topics that students are interested in.  They’ve been through a long process, including surveying 199 students at our school.  Last week, they finalized their book order and now we are waiting on it to come in.  Today, the boys made some final pieces to advertise the books as well as show people the process they went through.  Some worked on posters.  Others made a commercial for BTV, while others worked on an Animoto of the process.  Even though today was our last official meeting, several of the boys want to continue meeting to plan ways to promote the books to the school.  One idea was to take pictures of all of the books and make another Animoto for BTV.  Here is the Animoto that they made today to show the process that they went through.

Book Choice Champions.