Red Wings Read

One of the things I'm most excited about for this school year is a program I'm starting called Red Wings Read (our school mascot is the Red Wings!) Basically it's a modified "one book, on school" type of deal. Each year I plan to choose a book to "feature" in my library. I plan to promote the heck out of it and plan all kinds of activities for staff and students. One of my main goals with this program is to give students and staff a shared reading experience. I know it can be overwhelming for teachers to try and keep up with what students are reading. This way my teachers only have to read one book to be in the loop :) 

To start the program off I'm featuring Divergent by Veronica Roth. I chose this title for a couple of reasons. I love it. It was popular in my LMC last year. I thought teachers would enjoy it as well as students. The third book releases this year and the movie next year. Take your pick! But really it was because I love it so much :) 

The first thing I did was sit down and come up with as many ideas as I could to go with the book. Here's a post I did on my book review blog about it. I want the students to see the book everywhere! I'm really lucky in that I have a very supportive principal. We've done some pretty great things so far. Here's what we've started with.

* I wrote the aforementioned blog post about my ideas and shared it with anyone and everyone I thought might also have ideas. One the wonderful people who works with Veronica Roth saw it and sent me some awesome items to use! Here are a few of the things that were in the package:

* At our staff meeting my principal gave me some time to introduce my plan. I gave a brief overview of the book and my ideas. We played the teaser trailer for the movie. I then announced that every teacher, aide, counselor, etc... would received a copy of Divergent. Yeah, they cheered. It was awesome. I then passed out the Divergent faction quiz found at the Divergent Fans website. Every teacher took the quiz and I recorded which faction they were in. Later that week they each got a piece of paper with their faction symbol on it. I asked them to display it somewhere in/near their classroom. It has been so cool to see them everywhere in our school! It's certainly gotten our students talking!

Some of our faction symbols!

 *  Our school's open house was the first week of school. I had planned to do more for it but I was still working like crazy to get the iPads ready to hand out to students. It ended up being pretty low key. I modified the faction quiz I used with teachers and printed off copies for students and their families to take. I also printed off the answers and laminated them. I taped them to a table. Also on that table I had Divergent coasters, write-ups about what we're doing with the book and order forms. Before the open house I called our local independent bookstore. They worked with me to allow families a 20% discount on the books. Families could take an order form and return it to me with payment by the end of the next week. I dropped them off at the bookstore. Once the books were in (about a week wait) I picked them up and passed them out. Also, if students took the faction quiz they could enter to win a boxed set of Divergent and Insurgent or other prizes. 

The "What's your faction?" table

* I've just started working on a Red Wings Read site that will give the students more information about the book, author, movie, and what we're doing with it all here. You can check it out here. 

*Finally, I've used two small cases I have on the walls outside the main doors into our library to set up a Red Wings Read display. It features information about the book, the author, and a QR code that sends students to the site I created. 

Ignore the glare!

So far things have been going really well. My teachers are all reading the book and talking about it with each other and the students. As I wrote up this post I had a teacher come rushing in because she read Insurgent last night and just needed to talk about it. All our library copies of the book are checked out and the teachers are loaning the copies we gave them to students as well. It makes my heart so happy to see so many students and staff engaging in discussions about the book and getting excited about reading it. I love it when I'm walking down the hall and I overhear people chatting about Divergent and the other books. I can't even express how much I love it! I'm so grateful for this awesome book written by Veronica Roth and the excitement it's creating. I can't wait to do more!