Contests

We sponsor a contest about every month. Prizes are things we get free by doing the legwork on the Imagiantion Books or Books are Fun displays. This year we have gotten many copies of "Chicken Soup for the American Idol Soul" from them to use as prizes. We also hit up Sonic for free drink cards. We write to both WalMarts in town to get their max in donations and usually take them in $10 gift cards to give to winners. We select some free items like notepads and things from the book fair to use as prizes also. Last year flash drives were great as prizes. This year we had more gift cards than anything. 1) Most Admired Teacher Contest: We do this once a year in March. For the whole month we make announcements for the students to come in and vote for their favorite teacher and tell them to watch the log outside the library door each day to see how the vote is going. The thing is we change 25 cents per vote. It gets tight the last day when classes take up quarters and bring us a sack full so their teacher will win. The winning teacher gets his/her photo in the local newspaper and gets to select a book to add to our collection and we make a name plate to put in the book in their honor. This year the band director won by one vote and we made $116 on that one contest. We purchased "Mockingbird" (the unauthorized biography of Harper Lee) from Amazon.com to put in the collection on his behalf and will keep the rest as seed money for other library programming. We have done this for three years and it has always netted over $100 and the kids enjoy it. Our school does not recognize any special teachers.



2) Photography Contest: Every January we seek entries to our Photography Contest. Entries can be color, b&w, or photo essay. We follow the AAIM Media Festival rules and use their paperwork for each entry so that the winners can be sent to the state Student Media Festival by AAIM. Those are due in early February to AAIM. We name a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in each category and give $10 gift cards to first place, disposeable cameras to 2nd place, and something small like a Sonic coke card or notepad for 3rd. All receive a certificate that we have made up and printed and have their photo made and sent to the local paper. Winning entries then go to state and those winners are recognized but not given further prizes. AAIM has other contests too that you could have kids enter but our Multimedia and EAST teachers have students entering the other contests in the AAIM Student Media Festival. We find out who on staff or which spouses are into photography and ask them to come in and rank the photos. We also ask one of the local newspaper photogs to come by. This year the editor of the local paper came by to judge. Then we add up all the rankings to announce the winners.

3) Poetry Month Contest: Each year we sponsor some type of poetry push or contest for March. Different types of poems are used each year. One year we might strictly go with the types that match the English standards for each grade and name that contest for the teacher of that level of English like "Mrs. Garner's Blank Verse Contest"(11th) or "Mrs. Morton's Sonnet Contest"(12th) or "Mrs. Slay's Haiku Contest" (10th). The students pick up the forms and guidelines I have typed. The have a deadline to enter and have to sign that it is their own work. The teachers usually teach their poetry unit at that time and require some writing to be turned in so those that wish can then turn it in to us to be judged. Any student can enter any contest though, and they are not limited to just the one for their grade. They can enter as many as they like. We get former English teachers or HSU English majors to judge. We some times publish a booklet for the kids with all the winning poems; we do that about every 3 years and use the school copier to saddle stitch the booklets. We use volunteers to type like HSU English majors to type when we do that. All winners in each division get certificates and this year we did Quatrains, Blank Verse and Free Verse Contests. All the students who placed received $10 WalMart gift cards as we had written a donation letter specifically for this contest and requested the money. I will attach some of the handouts used to the Handout page of this wiki for you to see. 4) Quess whose feet these are? or Quess which pets go to which teacher? Whose baby photos are these? These contests are bulletin board contests. We take photos with our digital camera and print them in color and make a board and put numbers by each element and then place a file folder with the entry blanks attached in the corner of the bulletin board. The kids stand there and try to figure it out and then bring the completed form to the library to turn in. We put the ones that are correct in a glass bowl ( a huge glass Brandy snifter) and on a certain date, draw one to win the prize. The prize will probably be a book. Some times we have so many teachers who want to enter (they have to supply the pet photos) that we do two separate bulletin boards, one each week. This year we did a Match the President to the President's Wife" photo contest during Women's History Month. They did not like that one as well as the others. This is really fun to do and gets the kids excited. 5)This school year 08-09 we have already had an essay contest on Patriotism working with our US History classes. These were ranked (rule was at least 4 paragraphs and less than 2 pages) by some of the English teachers and the library staff had the final decision; we awarded 1st, 2nd, 3rd place and 2 honorable mentions and put a photo of all 5 kids in the paper, gave them certificates and prizes. The first three got Sonic gift cards of $5 each and the honorable mentions got items we had taken from the book fair like notepads or locks. We also sponsored a contest daily during Constitution week in September. We gave a question that was asked over theintercom during announcements that the kids could look up the answer to or come by the library and guess. They put slips with their answers in a bowl and we drew at end of day and if that person had the correct answer then they were announced the next day as the daily winner. We gave those huge Hershey candy bars as the prize since they were on sale at Walgreens for $1.50. Also during Banned Book Week we asked questions daily over the intercom and had a daily winner of a candy bar. Some of the kids are really getting into this. Here are the questions we used for the week in word 2003.