Scholastic does give you the materials you need for a teacher wish list. Our teachers get tons of books that way. We also always have it the whole week of open school, with a huge amount of parents shopping on the day or night they see their childrens teachers.
We also do a used book sale in the spring. No cost to the school at all, great prices for the students and parents and some money made for the school. A win-win situation for everyone!
Another idea we use at our school, in addition to teacher wish lists, open one evening for families, running it an entire week-twice a year:
we hold our annual Grandparent's Day during our spring book fair. Those grandparents want the kids to read and are VERY generous!
We also use the "set-up Monday, sales Tues., Wed., and Thurs., and break-down Friday" arrangement. It been said to save sanity!
Our school library also holds several Family Library Nights throughout each school year. They co-ordinate one of those nights to be during the Fall book fair and another to co-ordinate with the sale in the spring. Those nights, we keep the book fair open until 8 p.m. so parents who may not have been able to come in during the day to help with their child's class, or for some parents that want to simply see what the selection is that we're offering, it's worked great! It's an all around family / reading night!
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it" - Ferris Bueller
We changed our start date from Monday to Tuesday because so many kids forgot their money on a Monday. We now run the book fair from Tuesday through Thursday with makeups on Friday morning. This way, we set up on Monday afternoon and breakdown on Friday afternoon.
To ttnc4me....we have our rep put our start date one to two days prior to the actual start of the fair so we get delivery in time to set up and have a teacher preview. For example, if we start our fair for students on Monday, our rep puts into the computer it starts on Thursday or Friday so the delivery will be before that. That way there is plenty of time to set up and I am not running around like a crazy person trying to get stuff set up. Hope that helps.
When we have had something special going on, we let our rep know and she helps us out as best she can. We have had situations like letting our teachers add to their classroom libraries so we needed more non-fiction or when we did our book giveaway we need lots of books priced under $5. They sent what they could and we reordered quickly on the titles we saw going fast.
