Camas High School’s (CHS) Library Media Center (LMC) hosts various reading challenges throughout the school year to encourage students to become interested in reading and discussing books with their peers.
To promote these challenges, the library uses several forms of communication and advertisement.
“We put [the challenge announcement] in the communication that goes out every Friday via email,” CHS teacher-librarian Tonia Albert said. “We put it in the morning announcements. We have posters, and what has really helped is starting to put what’s going on in the library, or in the LMC, on the whiteboard out front every week.”
In addition to the library staff, students also help spread the word about what is going on in the LMC.
“I usually make most of the posters for SST special events, like with Sean Tamura and his financial stuff as well as other special guests like authors [that are] coming in for meetings and all of that,” CHS senior Henry Morgan said.
The LMC hosts special events and challenges to generate more interest from the student body. Their goal is to diversify the offerings in the LMC so that more people want to come.
“SST has been really good for us because it gives us 30 minutes a day when students are here that we can offer events,” Albert said. “So we have had a game day, we have had chess, silent reading, we did an author visit, a virtual author visit that was well attended.”
Albert said that she uses student focus groups to learn about what the student body wants to see in the LMC.
“We have a ton of data [from our focus groups] because we brainstormed a bunch of stuff, but the bottom line is students want more chances for community,” Albert said. “They want us to promote reading, but they really wanted a chance where they could do things that allowed them to interact or that we would facilitate.”
While there are things that the LMC team wants to improve on and expand, the feedback from past challenges is positive.
“[The challenge] was pretty fun because it let me experience more books that I would not normally read of different genres,” CHS sophomore Lukas Perger said.
Albert said that she is not the only responsible for creating positive and meaningful experiences in the LMC.
“There are three of us here that are adults that care about students and see needs, and then all of us come up with ideas and we bounce them off each other,” Albert said. “Our TA’s are super instrumental in helping since they can see the student perspective. They really help us with that too, and we just constantly ask for input from students.”
