Creating a Culture of Reading at your School

David Etkin of {Eat the Book} had a great guest post over at The Nerdy Book Club today.  He shared a lot of amazing ideas for creating in his words, "a dense, layered, revererberant atmosphere of READING and BOOKS" in the classroom or library.  Some of my favorite ideas that he shared:

• Create a What I've Read Recently/What I'm Reading Now display outside the classroom - Etkin posts color copies of the covers of books he's reading on the door to his classroom, and says its a great way to let kids know that teachers are readers, too.  I'd like to take this one step farther and possibly highlight a new teacher and a new student each month to add some more variety, and share even more books.
• Share book trailers during BookFlix Friday on the video announcements - this seems like a great way to highlight new books in the library, but it might be best to plan this far enough in advance so that the library can have multiple copies of the books that are shown.  There's nothing worse than create a lot of buzz for a book, then have the buzz die out when students can't actually get a copy.

Some other ideas that I have for promoting books in the library:

• Book summaries on bathroom stalls - umm, this one is pretty self explanatory...
• Mobile library in the lunch room - I like this idea because I think it's very simple.  Grab a book cart, some great books, a laptop, and a scanner, and head down to the library.  The only issue I could see would be how to advertise that you were coming.  I don't really want to walk around the lunchroom yelling "Books, book, get your books!", and I don't think a sign on the side of the cart would garner much attention.  Clearly this idea needs some work.
• Shelf talkers for nonfiction - I like the idea of putting up placards with background information next to books in the nonfiction section.  So perhaps near a shelf with a lot of books on diseases, I might put some interesting facts about epidemics or spreading diseases.  I've seen libraries where they use QR codes on books that link to site with background info, but many schools don't allow cell phones in schools, and this seems like a good work around.
• Display with books and student audio recorded book reviews - I've seen this idea floating around, but I have yet to see a good (affordable) way to accomplish this.  The idea is that a student reads a book they love, they record their recommendation on some kind of audio recording device, and the book and audio review get displayed prominently.  Learning Resources make Talk Points, which come close to what I would want to use, but (and this is a killer), they only record 10 seconds of sound.