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Tech Tips and Timely Tidbits by Heather Loy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
“Books With Bite” – TRW 2008
The Unquiet Librarian (Buffy Hamilton) recently posted a heads up about the upcoming Teen Read Week (October 12-18, 2008) theme “Books With Bite.” I’m grateful for this reminder because if I don’t plan ahead, I’d never get anything done. Her post and the TRW Wiki got me thinking about how I want to proceed next year…and I need some help/input.
I team up each year with the media specialist from Midland Valley High for our book club program (we share books to reduce costs) and she mentioned how her school will post a “genre’ of the month” in their student agendas next year. What a wonderful concept! Well, not to be outdone, I was thinking of taking the TRW theme and spreading it out over the school year. The TRW Wiki gave me some suggestions and I’ve added to them.
August 2008: Vampires
- To correspond with the release of Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series. I’m focusing only on vampires and not monsters as a whole due to the popularity of vampire books.
September 2008: Edgy Titles/Banned Books
- To tie in with Banned Book Week, I’d like to focus on edgy titles and challenged books.
October 2008: Monsters & Mythical Creatures
- Included here would be werewolves, dragons, faeries, etc. Some authors I’m considering are: Holly Black, Melissa Marr, Scott Westerfeld, Tolkin, Christopher Golden, Anne McCaffrey, and Neal Shusterman.
November 2008: Cooking
- I’d like to include fiction as well as non-fiction titles here. I’ve no problem pulling non-fiction titles, but will need help coming up with a fiction booklist.
That is as far as I’ve gotten on specific monthly themes. Here are some additional themes, but I’m not sure if I’ll use them and/or which month to promote them, plus I need at least two more to have a full school year (10 months) of themes:
- bites as in pests/insects
- bytes as in computer and computer gaming
- bites as in predatory animals
- bites as in “that bites” – the “I’d hate to be you” or troubling/misfortune books
- ?
- ?
What I’m hoping my readers will do is add to my related Books With Bite themes to give me more choices. I’d also like book suggestions for titles that are popular with your students/readers as they relate to each theme. AND if possible, I’d like to have corresponding logos/icons/avatars to go with each category to use on promotional materials. SO if you have any suggestions or ideas, please post a comment. THANKS!
May 12th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Heather,
Love these ideas and want to build on them to use in my media center!
Thoughts (that may be too far-fetched to consider):
1. “Okay, I’ll bite.” Familiar with this saying? Asking for a further explanation of something that seems far-fetched. Urban myths and legends? Nessie? Big Foot? Alien abductions? Also a good way to bring in a site like snopes.com where students can check out internet “stories.”
2. Really reaching here: “They’re biting today.” Fishing and other sports.
3. Another stretch: “biting off more than you can chew.” Planning, organization, goal setting? Doesn’t sound too promising with most teens, does it? Perhaps you could work in technology here – teaching students how to use read-write web tools to organize themselves.
Keep your ideas coming, Heather. You really have me excited about incorporating the TRW theme all year long!
May 12th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Okay, another idea to play with: McGruff the Crime Dog and his slogan “take a bite out of crime.” Copyrighted slogan? But if we could use it, we could pull in mysteries, forensics, and cyber crime.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Great ideas Fran. I like the urban myths/legends theme. I really like the “biting off more than you can chew” and along with planning/organizing, you could also change it to financial planning (specifically credit cards) to tie in with the SC mandated curriculum.
Carrie, one of my teachers said she commented, but I didn’t see that it showed up. I’m hoping she’ll repost as I can’t remember what all she told me this morning. She mentioned “Take a Bite Out of Crime” as in mystery/sleuth novels. She also said I didn’t need 10 themes as August and December for our district only have 2 weeks. She recommended combining them with Sept and November. That helps a bit, but with so many ideas, it’s going to be hard to choose….but that’s a good thing so keep ‘em coming!
May 14th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Carrie emailed me her ideas:
Bite Me – teen angst books, a little attitude, please!
Nail biters – suspense, horror books (Stephen King’s Carrie in my honor!)
Just a bite – short stories or poems
May 14th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Heather,
I love Carrie’s ideas! Now the problem will just be narrowing the list down. I think the kids wil love the “bite me” theme
Maybe this summer we can collaborate on lists of books for each month?
Fran
May 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Fran,
Yes, Carrie is always so creative and full of good ideas. I’d love to collaborate on booklists and will definitely need help for some of these themes. That’s the whole reason I wrote this post! I’m good on some of them (say August and Octobers themes, since those are the books I enjoy!) but will need help on the others. Will get in touch with you via email later. I’m thinking I’ll add a page to my blog for the booklists and/or use one of the wikis I started back during OpenPD.