Middle Grade Monday – the Tiny Budget Dilemma

My library has a tiny budget. Actually, that’s not true. My library has no budget. The books we are able to procure for our collection come mostly from the proceeds from our twice annual book fair, supplemented by donations and finds at the public library book sale. We recently completed our spring book fair. We pulled some books from the fair, and we will have some Scholastic dollars to spend once everything clears, but we were able to place a small order with one of our vendors. When your library serves 6th through 8th grades, though, the portion of those funds that end up going to middle grades titles are even smaller.

To be honest, every order we place is a combination of replacements for lost titles, new award winners, a couple of curricular tie ins with popular appeal, and only the most requested others. Here are the middle grade titles we received with this order:

The three of the four nonfiction titles are recent African American interest titles. They do support our 8th grade social studies curriculum, but they also help to build up our somewhat meager number of titles in this area. Our student population is generally 50% African American. I’m not sure what the goal of the opening day collection was, but it didn’t adequately address the interests of this portion of our population. Fully 95% of the non-fiction we order is middle grades, because that’s where our students are reading. We also received How to Speak Dog, which I have high hopes for attracting some of our more reluctant readers.

Both Smile and the two copies of One Crazy Summer are high demand replacements. And two copies of P.S. Be Eleven, because it is a sequel, won awards, and is, frankly, genius. One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven are also high demand because of the book talks I do on them. The books I love circulate more, especially among the 6th graders. The students know. Because of this, I have high hopes for A Summer of Sundays, even though similar titles are slow movers in my collection. I loved it. You can read my review here.

I was so excited when Doll Bones was recognized with a Newbery honor medal. Everything Holly Black publishes is pure gold with my students, and I’m sure this will not be the exception. One Came Home was the other Newbery honor book from this year that I thought might appeal to our population. Unfortunately, after I placed the order, I found out that it was Flora and Ulysses that was chose for the state Battle of the Books list. That’s always a struggle. It’s much to young for the vast majority of my students, but now we will need to find a way to purchase it. It’s not often that the Stonewall award is given to a book that I feel will really suit my middle grade readers, so I am excited to see how Better Nate than Ever moves. We have a fairly significant population of students who’ve expressed (at least to me) an interest in GLBTQ titles.

Finally, there is Who Done It? which looks like a great, fun way to introduce students to a variety of authors. the list of middle grade titles we had to hold off on for next time, as well as the ones that were out of stock, is too long to go into. Cross your fingers for us that these titles will get a lot of use and not get lost!

Filed under: Middle Grade Monday