Attention grabbing and EASY Book Fair Decorations

We all love book fairs. Regardless of the vendor, the provide our libraries with monies to be spent on books, author visits and other programming to help our students. Many book fairs have a theme. Personally, I have had good luck with the Scholastic program. Most of the time I use the theme they suggest, occasionally I go rogue and use something different. I have found that in my school, decorating the tables and such do not make the kids any more excited about the books. However, I have found that using large posters flanking the library doors does have an impact. It keeps the kids excited and it keeps sales brisk.

These are a few of my past book fair decorations.

There were two of these awesome reading tikis, one for each side. Painted by my awesome art teacher.

Both the cat and dog were also painted by my art teacher.

My art teacher was busy, so I got creative and did a bit of overhead tracing magic.

More overhead magic along with some die-cuts and construction paper embellishments.

Library windows 2014-2015

As with the bulletin boards, I was not as productive with windows this year. I'll blame it on being overly busy teaching. I recycle a lot of my props from one theme to another, using them differently. I love the dollar store, garage sales, the sale aisle of big box stores, and everyone else's cast offs. Creativity is key and the free is good.

No time to decorate? I adapted this idea and asked staff to pick their favorite books and pop in a speech bubble with a short quote. I found my bubbles at my local teacher store and laminated them for repeat use.

I went simple this year adapting this idea and did some paper cutouts that I laminated. 

The house windows are tissue paper.

 

I loved this window idea. I used a plastic tablecloth, printed & laminated letters, plastic spiders 

and super cool eyes that I found at the dollar store. I just need a better way to adhere 

the spiders to the window so you don't see the tape. 

 

The dollar store again, with another tablecloth, fruit, party favors, knight shields (in the other window), 

jewels, a gold plate and crowns

This is actually a pirates chest from the party store. It gets used quite a bit.

Again, just lots of stuff I've collected over the years. Mix and match to use them differently. The kids enjoy looking at them as they line up in the hall going to or from other places. It is a great way to keep them interested in books and reading.

Bulletin Boards 2014-2015

Apparently every time I walked past my bulletin board and thought it needed to be changed, it REALLY did need to be changed, because I pathetically only did a few boards this year. Which obviously becomes goal number one for next year.

We started the year with our summer reading board still up, so I did not change it until fall.

For the fall tree I used my Big Tree kit and an assortment of other fall leaves. 

The scarecrow is from a Mailbox book of patterns that I use for a lot of cutouts.

In January I used the International Kids kit and focused on country books with a travel theme. 

To highlight historical fiction and biographies, I used cutouts from the Mailbox book 
and a few pieces from the Civil Rights Pioneer Bulletin Board Set.

Inspiration comes from Pinterest (who doesn't love Pinterest?) the fall board was from this uploaded photo, the travel was loosely taken from this photo and I'm not certain where I came up with the historic idea since I haven't anything pinned. It might just be an original idea. Gasp!

I did one final board, but I can not show a photo of it because I displayed student work. The kids absolutely loved it and I will most likely make it an annual event. I got the idea from this blog post. Found some clipart that was similar to what she used and made my to fit a half sheet of 8.5x11 copy paper. Some of the work was really quite good and the students enjoyed looking at all the different book titles.