School Library Fun with Stickers

Are you looking for some school library fun for your students? Read on to learn how something as simple as cute animal stickers can: facilitate community building with lucky ducks; reward library book returns; encourage participation in checkout challenges; “pay” student shelvers; reward AR quiz results; prompt conversations with students; add more school library fun with joke of the day; provide incentives for your mystery student; and add bingo prizes for teacher collaboration opportunities.

Warning: When you receive your stickers, take time to glance at them all before making them available to students. Sometimes, inappropriate stickers appear in the shipments, and you want to remove those before anyone on your campus sees them.

School Library Fun with Lucky Ducks

Have you heard of lucky ducks? Here’s how it can work in your school library. Buy 30 small rubber ducks and use a permanent marker to label them 1-30 on the bottom. If your students are already assigned a number in their classroom, they will keep this same number in the library. If your students are not assigned a number in their classroom, you can label the tabletops in your library so that each student is sitting at a numbered spot.

After students are seated for your library lesson, you will draw one duck from your bucket of ducks. The student with that number will be the lucky duck, your helper for the class that day (no more arguments over who gets to hand out the papers). You will announce the lucky duck, and everyone will know who he or she is. The lucky duck gets to help with handing out papers and supplies, library checkout, sharpening pencils, or whatever tasks are needed. At the end of class, the lucky duck makes sure that all chairs are pushed in and tables are tidy AND they get to choose a sticker!

Thank you to Tina Rose LaMontagne for sharing this idea in our Learning Librarians Facebook group!

Stickers for Book Return Rewards

As you may know, I use these library cards to reward students who return their library books each week. I wrote this blog post about how I organize those school library cards so that students can be more independent in their library visits. I have a treasure chest (a Sterilite 3-drawer desktop organizer, spray painted gold) of prizes for students to choose from after they’ve returned their books 6, 12, 18, 24, and 30 times. Stickers make a great addition to the treasure chest as a prize for students to choose from!

As you can see from the photo, I don’t recommend trying to bling out your treasure chest with sparkly stickers. Those proved to be irresistible temptations for little fingers.

Stickers for a Checkout Challenge

Do you have checkout challenges in your school library? Maybe you encourage students to check out books from a display shelf and write a book review. Or maybe you challenge students to check out a book from a different genre each month, or a different nonfiction section, like biography or poetry. Maybe you want to observe students using a shelf marker. Whatever the challenge is, you can reward students who complete their challenge with a sticker!

You can often find pocket charts like this one in your Scholastic Dollars Catalog, to display your gallery of sticker choices for students.

Stickers to Reward Student Shelvers

Rachel Oldaker shared her system of training 4th and 5th grade students to shelve books, then rewarding them with one sticker for every 10 books they shelve. She warns that this is not a perfect system, and books occasionally do end up in the wrong spot. But her students love it, and most of the books are in the right place.

Stickers for Accelerated Reader

If your school participates in the Accelerated Reader program, you might want to adopt Chastity Powers’ idea to give students a sticker for every 100 they score on an AR test. It helps her remember to check their AR progress, and it’s an easy reward to provide to your readers.

Success Stickers to Start Conversations

Andrea Norton shared in our librarian Facebook group that she displays Success Stickers. When there is a break in instruction, like when students are checking out books, students can tell her about a success they’ve had that week and pick a sticker. It helps her get to know her students in a different way, as they share with her successes they’ve had in reading, but also successes they’ve had outside of school, in sports, or with siblings.

School Library Fun with Joke of the Day

Highlight the jokes section of the library by sharing a joke of the day under your document camera. As students check out their books, if they can tell you the answer to the joke of the day, you can give them a sticker. You can do this every week, or maybe just one week a month, to add variety and school library fun to class visits.

Need to update your joke section? check out National Geographic’s Just Joking series, Highlights Laugh Attack Joke Books, Rob Elliott’s Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids, and the Sidesplitting Jokes series by Lisa Regan.

Sticker Student for Library Behavior

If you have a long library class period and you require students to read for a certain amount of time, you can reward students who read with a sticker. If you use the Class Dojo app, you can allow students to redeem dojo points for a sticker.

Another way to use stickers in your school library is to choose a mystery student at the beginning of each library class. At the beginning of the class, remind students of library expectations and remind them that you are observing one mystery student. Watch to see if that library student is following the library rules. If they do, announce their name at the end of class, congratulate them on being a great example of library behavior, and allow them to choose a sticker. If they don’t, you will not announce their name, but will give them another chance the following week. Allow them 2 chances to win, then move on to another student for the mystery student drawing. Remove the winners’ names from the drawing so that every student has a chance to win at least once during the school year.

Want to learn more about how to manage student behavior in your school library? Check out my School Library Classroom Management ebook.

Stickers as Bingo Prizes

I recommend keeping a bingo set in your school library so that you can play bingo as a reward for whole class library book returns and for reading incentives that you collaborate on with your classroom teachers. For example, I once partnered with a first grade teacher to help her students build up their reading stamina. When all of the students in the class could “read to self” for 15 minutes, we had a bingo party in the library. We celebrated again later in the year when they could “read to self” for 30 minutes. Giving teachers extra planning time while you celebrate with their students is a great way to build partnerships with teachers. It typically only works if you are on a flexible schedule, where you have blocks of time set aside for collaboration.

Additional Resources

• Link to Amazon Stickers
• Link to Printable Library Cards with Rewards
• Link to School Library Classroom Management Ebook

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