Friday 5

Time for another round of the Friday 5!

Here are some interesting facts about the library for the past few weeks:

(1) I think that the students are eating the bookmarks I put out for them to take. Or they've become a hot commodity on campus. Or they're trading them for Twinkies. I'm not sure which, but we have run through nearly 1,000 bookmarks in the last two weeks. Yikes! That was not really a line item in my budget that I had planned on.

(2) Turning books in on time seems to be a real problem this year. I hope this gets better SOON because we are going to have a lot of sad students when these overdues turn into lost book fines after 30 days.

(3) The hot book right now is "Mark of Athena" by Rick Riordan. No surprise there. The kids are reading through our 5 copies pretty fast, but the hold list seems to be at a constant 15 or 20 students. Also rans in the Top 10 this week include: "The Maze Runner" (Dashner); "Catching Fire" (Collins); "Chomp" (Hiaasen); "Dark Lord" (Thomson).

(4) Okay, so it's not really library-related, but our principal spent a day working from the roof this week to pay back a "bet" to the students made during our recent fundraiser. The school was challenged to raise $40,000 (which would have doubled last year's amount). Because they met that goal, the principal spent a cold, rainy Wednesday up on the roof conducting business.

(5) We had an AMAZING author visit a couple of weeks ago with John Stephens ("Emerald Atlas," "Fire Chronicle"). I wish I had pictures to post, but the school computers were attacked by a computer virus last week and the pictures are all gone. But I must give a "shout out" of thanks to Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, as well as the publisher (Knopf Books for Young Readers), for allowing Evergreen to be included on Mr. Stephens' book tour. I cannot recommend this author enough if you are looking to host a school visit. This was definitely one of our top 2 author visits EVER! I've included a video interview (not done by me, but can be found on the author's website) so you can get a better sense of the fun we had. THANK YOU Mr. Stephens!