Book Tastings

One of my most favorite things to do as a Media Specialist is to host book tastings! In our library, we host book tastings for both teachers and students throughout the year to share new books, spotlight genres, and to love on books that often get forgotten. 

This week, we had the opportunity to host TWO book tastings - one for a fifth-grade class and one for teachers and staff. We had the most fun with our readers! 

For our fifth graders, we pulled between 10 to 15 books in five different genres: mystery, fantasy, poetry, non-fiction, and humor. When students arrived, we escorted them to their reserved table where they were met with a genre "menu" and "book graffiti" placemat. Students picked a book from their selection platter and spent about 10 minutes getting to know that book and recording their first impressions of the book on their genre menu. We repeated this process for each of the five genres. Afterwards, students enjoyed juice and muffins as they shared about their book finds and jotted down notes about books they would like to checkout from the Media Center! 

Our book tasting for the teachers just so happened to land on Valentine's Day so we went with a "sweet" theme for this event. :) Earlier in the semester, we sent teachers a survey to check in and also to see how our professional book collection could be improved to better meet their needs. We then took their feedback and ordered books in the following categories: Inspirational, STEM, English/Language Arts, and Innovation. Teachers stopped by throughout the day to munch on sweet treats as they browsed our new books. 

Interested in hosting a book tasting of your own? This resource on TpT is amazing and chock full of everything you could possibly need to get started! 

Happy Reading!