Happy Holidays from BRiMS and Bookmarked

I run two book groups at Patrick Taylor. My high school book group, Bookmarked, was created in the fall of 2007 which was my second year as librarian at the school. The students really wanted a library club, but the square footage of the library was so small that I could not imagine how any students could do any actual library work. Instead I created a book discussion group. Not only did we meet to talk books, but I tapped these students to help me with fundraisers and special programming like Teen Read Week. Helping me with these special activities seemed to appease the members. I waited until February of 2009 to institute a book discussion group for my middle school students called BRiMS, or Books Rule in Middle School. Both of the groups meet during lunch, and this year, the school added a third lunch. Now BRiMS is made up of only 6th and 7th graders. Bookmarked has 8th-12th grade students. This has actually worked well because in 2014 and 2015, Bookmarked lost a lot of members who graduated. We needed to recruit new members, and the many 8th graders who are into books have blended just fine into the club. 

I try to do some special activities with both groups that revolve around reading but might be a little outside of the box. When BRiMS met for their last meeting of the year, we wanted to create a video that celebrated the new year. 

This is what we came up with:

  BRiMS wishes you Seasons Readings 2015 from Elizabeth Kahn on Vimeo.


Not to be outdone, members of Bookmarked, decided to create a holiday video, too:


Bookmarked wishes you Happy Holidays 2015 from Elizabeth Kahn on Vimeo.

In October, I got an email from the author, Chris Grabenstein. He was asking for kids to send him short video clips to be included in the book trailer for his newest book, Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics. BRiMS filmed their run outside, and we sent it to the author. It seems that we did not make the final cut. Grabenstein did, however, make a slightly longer trailer with the out takes. It is still less than two minutes. BRiMS can be seen in blue shirts running in front of a bunch of trees.

I do wish everyone a loving, peaceful, and happy new year. I can't wait to see what 2016 brings to us in all things book related. Who knows, the next Harry Potter could be on its way to  the publishers right now.