The Shelf Elf

The Shelf Elf offers excellent reinforcement of Book Care skills and how to take care of our library shelves.  With rhyming "rules", Skoob lets us know how to take care of books.  One of my favorite pictures is the one where students need to find the three books that are out of place or "wrong" on the shelves.  I like to read this book in the story tower, but I see a lot of possibility with projecting this particular picture on the smartboard for students to circle the books that need to be fixed.  To follow up from this book, we have a Golden Shelf Elf award (it's a bookmark - don't get too excited) to distribute at the end of each second and third grade class.  One student from the class list is pre-selected and observed throughout the class.  If the student displays good "shelf elf" behavior, he or she is given the Golden Shelf Elf Award at the end of class.  If, however, he/she is not the no one gets to know who the shelf elf was, leaving the mystery in their minds that it could have been them.  This offers a good self reflection of appropriate behavior in the library. 

PS - I tried to convert my word doc GSA bookmark to a Google Doc to share as a link here, but was unsuccessful in doing so.  If you are a school librarian interested in a copy of your own, just email me or leave a comment, and I will email the doc as an attachment.