CAS Project Preparation: Blind Date with a Book!!
My Creative & Active Service Project Preparation
A Bibliophile World
I have always been a great lover of books, so when a few seniors last year came up with Blind Date with a Book for their CAS Project, I immediately knew I wanted to take it over my senior year! I knew I would love getting my community to come together and donate money to charity, the Ferst Foundation encouraging and advancing childhood literacy as they help to place books in the hands of children so they become more productive adults. I knew getting to look over and wrap hundreds of books would be an incredibly fun experience for me as I got to share my love of reading with other readers and future readers. It sounded like the perfect CAS project, so I made sure to get started as soon as senior year began!
Donations & Blind Date Profiling
For this event, I asked friends, family, teachers, and clubs, such as Key Club, Friends of Rachel, and Book Clubs, to donate new to gently used children, teen, and adult books to my event. I collected these books over the months leading up to Valentine's Day and spent time before, during, and after school gathering and wrapping them up in old newspapers from our community to give the event its own feel of local love and unity. Before hiding away their titles, authors, and art, I scanned the bar codes of the books to gather their information on genres, themes, references, and other classification data. I then wrote the books details and hints on small pieces of paper that I then taped onto the fully wrapped and covered up book, adding some ribbon and cute label embellishments until the book was only its shape and subjects.
Collaboration & Wonderful Wrapping Help
As more and more people donated books of all kinds to the event, I needed help wrapping the great deal of books. I teamed up with Key Club as they ordered a meeting dedicated to helping me wrap. My IB classmates helped me bring up the cart of books to the meeting space the day before, also helping me cut the laminated flyers I made for the event. At the meeting, I explained the event and cause and invited them all to come, handing out newspaper and tape for Key Club to cover up the books. I also had them write down the title and author of each book on a sticky note in order to make everything go a bit smoother; I would research, label, and decorate the books later.
After Key Club's incredible help, I received more books for the event. Thus, I called upon my very own club for which I'm president, Friends of Rachel, to help me wrap the remaining books. Using the same process I put together for Key Club, my club members did a great job helping me out as I invited them all to come as well.
When I received even more donations, I was given the great help of our very own media center interns, helping me by wrapping, labeling, and decorating books that I wasn’t able to get to during the school day. There was an incredible show of collaboration and unity within this project’s long preparation as we all worked toward something beautiful; I was so grateful!
Advertisement & Invitations
The week before Valentine's Day, media center interns and I hung up the Blind Date with a Book Flyers I made around the school, and the announcements alerted the students and teachers of the event. I personally invited the English Department, my IB teachers, and friends to come throughout the day, my mother presenting the flyer to all of her classes in the days leading up to the event and other teachers asking me about bringing down their whole classes. I also advertised the event on my social media.
Finishing & Setting Up
I finished all of the book wrapping, labeling, and decorating a couple of days before Blind Date with a Book, taking home big bags of books to finish myself, my mom wrapping the ribbon and placing the stickers on the books I was perfecting and describing while we sat at home and watched TV (we even got to watch the Oscars!).
Prep Finally Done!
In my next post, I will write of the day's events and how everything went. People should start arriving early in the morning to walk about the aisles of books seeing only the descriptions among the pretty ribbons and stickers. Each individual book will cost one dollar, with all proceeds going to support the Ferst Foundation. I hope people will then stay around for a while to unwrap their books and share their new findings after all the work we did to get them into the hands of readers all over the school, their Blind Date beginning as the anonymity is stripped away in generous and loving revelation!
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