Just $10 more needed to reach our $2620 goal!

A burgeoning spring tradition at Bethany Elementary is our "March Book Madness" book competition. Similar to college basketball's March Madness, the 4th and 5th grade teachers create a collection of 32 of the newest books and pit them against one another in bracket competition. Over several weeks, kids learn about the books, read as many as they can, and vote on the ones they want to see move on to the next round until there is one, final Book Madness Champion. We have done some version of this for the past four years. Each year we learn a little bit more and strive to make improvements the following year. I think all would agree, that last year's competition was our most successful and engaging yet. We even received a video message from Lindsay Currie, the author of our winning book  The Girl in White.

In previous versions of this competition, once the books are announced the teachers and kids have to scramble to find them at the local library and books stores. While it's fun seeing kids track down books in their free time, too many kids are left out in the early stages. As the field tapers, more books are procured, but the early choices are left behind and ignored. In thinking about these issues, we realized the need for some important upgrades to our tournament. The first is, we want to give the kids more time to read the books before kicking off the competition. And second, we need to be able to get books in kids' hands early and often. 

In order to increase engagement and inspire kids to even greater reading heights, we want to provide each 4th and 5th grade classroom with a set of all 32 book madness titles for the March 2024 competition. Our plan is to announce and distribute the titles in February, which will give kids several weeks to start reading and discussing the books for that year's competition. With more titles than kids in the class (hopefully), there should always be a few titles waiting to be read. Then, when we start voting in March, kids will have a more informed connection to the books and be driven to read as much as possible. We want to inspire kids to read beyond their comfort zone and be pushed to greater literary heights--while having a bit of fun along the way. 

For those of you not familiar with Bethany's Book Madness, here is  a link to our slideshow from 2023's competition. In it, you can see the brackets evolve over the weeks, and you can watch announcement videos for each round. As you will notice, the selected books cover a range of genres, which encourages kids to broaden their reading diet. The teachers also try to draw titles from a diverse range of authors, characters and content. This helps ensure the kids are able to see themselves and/or their friends in many of the titles and also helps them grow not just as readers, but as people.

New, hardcover middle grade books typically cost $17 each, and through a connection with local bookseller Green Bean Books I can purchase all books at a 20% discount. This means books, on average, will cost $14. One set of 32 books will cost about $435. And with the dollar-for-dollar match from BEF with the The Anne Kelly Ofstun Tubby Endowment Fund, your donation goes TWICE as far. Thank you to our Bethany PTO for getting us started with a $500 donation!