Banned Books Week 2015

The American Library Association recognizes Banned Books Week every fall, and this year we do so from September 27 - October 3.

According to the ALA's website, there is a clear difference between challenging a book or banning a book:

The Office of Intellectual Freedom tracks the books challenged in a year's time, and the following books were the top 10 most frequently challenged titles in 2014:

To recognize Banned Books Week and to bring the topic to students' attentions, we have two library displays that have sparked great questions and conversations with students.

Are you talking with your students about Banned Books Week? Have you had conversations about your rights related to reading? Maybe you've even noticed that you've read a challenged or banned book! 

New Library Display

We're featuring a new library display in our two-sided display case at the entrance to the library--check it out!

We featured our top 9 titles--all of them Iowa Teen Award nominees--along with items from Starbucks to find out if anyone was "thirsty for a good book."

Promoting the Iowa Teen Award Titles, Part II

With the Iowa Teen Award nominees ThingLink presentation ready to share, students in 6th and 7th grade reading classes visited the library over the first two weeks of school to learn more about the 15 titles featured this year. (See post below.) After talking about the book nomination process, students received a handout to use to record their thinking about the books.

You can access the entire handout HERE.

Students then had most of a class period to watch book trailers and read book-related content or visit author websites to learn more about the nominees. After three full days of classes visiting the library, every single title is checked out, and some titles now have a double-digit number of holds on them! Students definitely are interested in talking about and reading the books from this year's list!

Check out the ThingLink presentation in the post below and consider which of the titles might interest you. We'd love to have you stop by the library to check out one of them!