Preparing for our Earth Day Book Exchange

Posted by
Alex Sharp
Apr 17, 2009

My class is hosting our Earth Day book exchange on Wednesday, April 22. I explain how to do this in my article on the subject, but I wanted to offer some more ideas from my class experiences. I love book exchanges. I wrote another article about having them for Read Across America.

First, we ordered everything from Upstart last month, so unless your district will pay for overnight shipping, the bags might have to wait until next year. I wanted to have real pictures to post of what we were doing, and I had to go out of town unexpectedly, so that has delayed the article.

We wrote "Happy Earth Day" on the back of all the bookmarks - my students will especially pretty handwriting did that - and I signed them. Then we put bookmarks in all the bags. I emailed parents to update them on what we were doing, and this is what I said:

"For Earth Day this year (April 22), we will have an optional book exchange. Students are not obligated to participate. Students can bring used chapter books from home (that they are willing to give away) and we will put them in our special Earth Day “read, return, repeat bags). Then, on Earth Day, the students can pull out “new” books. If they want to read them and keep them, that is fine. If they read them and exchange them for a different book in our Earth Day box, that is fine. We will keep the box open and running as long as the students are interested in it.

When it comes closer to Earth Day and the students start bringing books, please help them choose books that they are glad to give away and never see again. They can bring as many books as they want to give away – some students won’t have any that they want to give away, so hopefully we will also have students who bring multiple books. We also have some discard library books to get us started."

The kids have known for weeks that we are going to do this. I have pictures of them setting it up to submit to the newspaper, so hopefully they will get recognized for their willingness to go green, share, and read.

I will get up pictures of the bag - which we tested as holding three books from the Twilight series, and you can see it endured - plus the bookmarks.