Background

I have been a school librarian for over 15-years. In that time, I have served taught in high school and elementary libraries across the state of Washington. This school year, I have the pleasure of serving as the Teacher-Librarian at Central Valley High School, in Spokane Valley, WA. CV, as it is know regionally, is a large (2400 students) and diverse building. This is a school steeped in rich history. Along with a long history comes a large accumulation of stuff. In the library, this stuff consisted of 45-years of books that needed an aggressive weeding, but what does one do with thousands of discarded books? Make a Holiday Book Tree!

Materials

• Books, Books, and more Books!
• Floor space
• Lights & decorations (optional)

Project

Once students were given the green light to begin, they quickly located prime real estate in the library to construct the book tree. We had a large collection of bound Life Magazine books that made a great base for the book tree. The fact that they were a beautiful dark green color added character to the project. My Teacher Assistants (TA's) were keen on engineering the book tree without internal support. Since they researched build techniques ahead of time, they had seen examples of internal structures being added to provide structural support, but decided against this idea and opted to engineer their book tree with a large and stable base and a gradual subtraction of books by layer, creating a visually pleasing conical shape. For color, the TA's stripped off the dust jackets of two dozen books and sprinkled them throughout the structure to add pops of color and visual interest.

Student Take-Aways

Upon completion, the TA's were a little disappointed with the overall height of the book tree. After debriefing, they decided that a more gradual subtraction of books per layer, and a pattered disbursement of smaller books (pops of color) would have added more structural integrity, therefore, allowing for a taller overall tree.

Learning Extensions

• Students determine how much floor space would be require for a book tree, if the base of the tree consisted of 24 - 18" x 11" books.
• Students calculate the overall weight of the book tree.
• Students construct a book tree made up of their own personal favorite titles or genres.
• Student only use books of a specific color (monochromatic) or complementary colors (poly-chromatic).
• Working in teams, students complete to build the tallest book tree using the same number of books.