I kept the basic outline of summer reading from last year, but I made a few changes to make the programs more self-sufficient and sustainable.
Our adult summer reading program is separately run, with different dates - it's a fairly traditional program with a log to fill in and tickets for drawing prizes solicited from local businesses. High school students can opt to join the adult program and a few do every year, but I don't particularly track it.
We're using iRead's theme, Plant a Seed, Read, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The general "Youth Summer Reading" brochure is an 11x17 page, folded in half. The front page lists all the summer reading programs and the main change I made to this was to take away the specific dates so I could print a large number of these and reuse them every year. I also received permission from the Friends of the Library to include a coupon for a free book from their bookstore. The other three pages are summer reading logs from Everyday Reading.
This brochure is distributed to all three elementary schools and the four year old kindergartens. There's no registration or staff component - people just take it and fill in the reading logs as they choose. Part of this main program is that there is a choice between two activity kits each week during summer reading. We try to make one aimed at older kids and one at younger kids. My associate is largely in charge of these - in the past, the teen volunteers have helped pack them, but we are not really doing that this year b/c of *waves hands* everything going on.
The Youth Summer Reading Challenge was changed from a booklet to individual bookmarks this year. Most of these can be completed and turned in for croc shoe charms, but I have a few tickets and passes, provided via our consortium. There was one that I used to handle and I turned that over to our consultant this year and I am SO GLAD I did! I completely overhauled all the challenges and my associate then reworked all of the designs.
The other way I adapted these this year was making them double as tickets for drawings. In the past, I've had a lot of misc. prizes donated and I did a raffle drawing with tickets in August. I have always detested any kind of prize drawings for kids and thought I had gotten rid of the whole concept years ago. However, very nice people persisted in giving me prizes. I think (hope?) I have finally got a workable solution - I will put out a picture of a prize each week and kids can put their reading challenges in as tickets then the winner will be drawn the following week. No lengthy anticipation, no prize sitting there to be cried over, short, sweet, and simple. I hope.
For the tweens/teens, I made a few tweaks. I've gone back and forth on what age can do the teen program - most of our participants are middle schoolers and they're the ones who are most interested in it. However, we had a lot of issues with younger kids wanting the teen prizes, teens giving their prizes to younger siblings, and kids wanting to spin the prize wheel. This year we kept our bingo sheet, with some minor changes in content, but most importantly in the new space the teen prizes will be kept in a storage room so they won't be visible to the younger kids.
The teen prizes are all pretty small - I have books (I couldn't find most of my stash of prize books so I got some new ones from Book Depot), stickers, candy, fidgets, etc. Most items are around 50 cents apiece.
I am hoping the updates will stay good for the next several years, or until I've run out of all the summer brochures I had printed! We may not have drawing prizes every week, but I'm ok with that. I do get occasional requests for a more "traditional" program, but one of the great things about being in an area with a lot of libraries is that folks can find just the right one for their needs and wants and there's always something for everybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment