Celebrate School Library Month with this no-prep activity that doubles as advocacy

I solemnly swear this is not an April Fool’s joke. The joke is actually that I don’t get to do anything for the library the first week of school library month due to state testing, but I’ll save that grievance for another post. Today we’re celebrating!

Happy National School Library Month! I’m currently consumed by a need to advocate more for myself and our profession as a whole right now, so over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some posts with language and resources that you can use in your own advocacy work for our profession, whether you’re a school librarian or just someone who appreciates what we do.

Today, I’m sharing some templates that you can ask students and staff to fill out, then post all over to celebrate your library. It’s a no-prep (print and go!) activity that doubles as advocacy

The templates have simple sentence stems that students and staff can complete:

• I love my library because…
• School librarians…
• Reading matters because…

They’re open-ended enough to be used with any students who can read/write through 12th grade.

I set these out on a table in the library with colorful markers alongside several printed articles and studies about the benefits of reading, school libraries, and school librarians. For the littlest students, the articles and studies might be too much, but for high schoolers, sifting through the data and informational text adds a thin layer of research skills and critical thinking to the activity to make it a little meatier (and more useful to you from an advocacy standpoint).

As students complete the prompt and cut out the book, I’ve been posting them on the glass wall that serves as one wall of our library. I’m going to continue to add to the display through the end of the month. This is the first year I’m trying this, so I’ll update this post or write a new post with a photo of the final product.

If you want to try it, you can download it below for free. (Honestly, if someone out there is charging people for library advocacy materials, I cannot even.)

Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing a list of the roles and tasks that fall to me as a secondary school librarian. Hopefully it’s educational for those of you not in our world and tangibly helpful for those of you who are.

What do you do to celebrate School Library Month? Please share your ideas in the comments!