In the Children's Room: Themeless Thursday: July Displays

We had a special guest for story time last week, so no Theme Thursday or craft to report this week. But I wanted to show off some of the current displays and since I've got my Tuesdays (where all the random stuff goes) scheduled for the next 3 months, this seemed like a great excuse.

Ramadan snuck up on me y'all! It starts tomorrow and if I hadn't been in a training on Monday where someone mentioned it, it would have passed me by. We don't have a whole lot of books on Ramadan so I supplemented with books on Islam and this giant green crescent and star. And yes, I know that the crescent and star aren't actually symbols of Islam, but it's really hard to find visual representations for a religion that eschew symbols.

Due to my total lack of knowledge about Ramadan and its timing, I've resolved to become more aware of world holidays and better about informing our users about them. To that end, here's my new Celebrate and Learn board with a space to rotate the holidays as they happen. I like the concept, but not the outcome. The light blue butcher paper is seriously faded and it just doesn't pop. Maybe after Ramadan is over I'll revisit the execution.

My new favorite display is Good Movie? Great Book! I've been trying to figure out how to stage it for a while because we have so little actual display space. I eventually cleared off a shelf in the DVD section and set up shop there. Since the space is so small, the DVD and book pairings are constantly changing, so maybe this way it'll stay fresh longer. I think I've had to fill in four pairs since this picture was taken on Tuesday.

I was going for a movie theater look with the heavy red curtains and glittery marque letters. Do you guys know about Rachel Moani's blog? Because her displays are a constant source of amazement and inspiration and I stole the technique for the red curtains directly from her.

The air conditioning at work has been broken for the past two days. And it is miserable in the building. Particularly upstairs in the children's room. In fact, today the temperature reached over 90 degrees and we had to shut down the room. So I spent most of my day manning the adult reference desk after most of the staff left early due to heat exhaustion. I'm not even joking. As a result, my third big display for the month isn't quite done. Tomorrow. Maybe.

Until then, here are a few in process pictures, including the concept sketch. I love summer road trips, don't you?

I have little popsicle stick tags for (most of) the states and will be filling in the display with books that take place in different states. 50 books is probably ambitious, so I'll do about 15 at a time, filling in as they get checked out.

I'm also playing around with making this a drop-in program. Prizes for reading a certain amount of state books, state trivia questions, naming all 50 states (which is a lot harder than you would think. I couldn't and as a result am missing tags for South Carolina, Kansas and Rhode Island. I have two degrees and my grandmother lives in South Carolina. That's pretty bad, y'all.) But the programming aspect is still a ways off.