Summer Reading 2026

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.

Summer Reading 2025

Among many other things, I've been meaning to do a comprehensive overview of the evolution of our summer reading programs. That's not going to happen, so I'm going to whip up a quick overview of this summer. Since there will be renovations, leading to major changes, I want an overview of this last "normal" summer.

The adult summer reading program is separate from the youth program. However, high school students can opt to join the adult program instead of the teen program. A few take the materials every year, but I would say only a small percentage of those actively participate - it's not something we track though.

The youth programs run from the first Saturday in June to the Saturday before the county fair, the last week of August. Depending on where these dates fall, youth summer reading runs for 10-12 weeks.

This is the front of our Family Reading Adventure. It's a four page brochure - the cover lists all the summer reading programs, the other three pages are reading logs, one for each month, from Everyday Reading. We change these up a little each year. The other part of this program is that there is a choice of two activity kits each week all summer. No logging or tracking is required - kids just pick one up when they visit the library. I sometimes have kids come show me their reading logs, just because they had fun doing them, but that's about it. I've tried different things with the kids getting a book or coupons at the end of the month, but this year I skipped all that - I gave out free books at the beginning of summer when the kids got their summer reading materials and that went very well, although I won't necessarily repeat it (I was cleaning out the basement in preparation for renovations).

Last year, I added Summer Reading Challenge, with croc charms as prizes, inspired by my library friend Ami. I did learn (the hard way) not to just give out the bracelets for the charms, since those were more expensive and most of the kids promptly lost them. This is a small, multi-page booklet. Any coupons or passes I have are included but most of the challenges are for croc charms. Interest in coupons and passes has mostly died out - I even sometimes have trouble getting people to take tickets for our local county fair, although that's more of a timing thing I think. The biggest fans of this program are kids ages about 5 to 10, although there are definitely some older (and younger) kids who love the charms and marking off the check boxes. This year I made displays to go with the summer reading challenges.

We adapted our Tween and Teen summer reading last year to limit the number of spins or tickets kids could get at a time - we had kids saving them all up and then letting their younger siblings have some and... it was a mess. Now they can get two spins per week, once for reading that week (anything and we don't have any accountability whatsoever) and one for a genre challenge (again, no rules about what "counts" or what doesn't.) We have a prize wheel to spin, looked on with much envy by the younger kids, and three boxes of mixed prizes. They include candy (that goes fast) coupons for a free book, misc. small toys, stickers, more challenging kits (that didn't work for the younger kids) and random things we have collected or purchased. There's not actually any purpose for the wheel, other than the cachet of getting to spin it since we just randomly divide everything into the different boxes. We used to actually have it so you spun and got a free book or candy or a kit, etc. but it was too disappointing for the kids who really didn't want one of the books we had or a kit etc.

The only "tracking" we do is to stamp the kids' sheets for the reading challenges etc. However, that's mostly for the parents and teens who feel they need some kind of accountability. Says a lot about our society if you ask me. This also fits in with my philosophy that if you are concerned about kids "cheating" at summer reading, you don't make more rules, you change the program. In fact, early this summer we had a patron confused (probably due to the language barrier) and accidentally take about 70 activity kits. It was no big deal - we just made a few more and life went on.

That being said, I do still have people who insist on giving me things "for summer reading prizes" and August is generally a slower month so I put out all the misc. things I've accumulated, a box of tickets, and let people put in tickets to win a prize. My ideal prizes for this are less than $20 in value or not super popular items - otherwise the kids get upset and/or too invested in it.

Materials on Canva

• Family Reading Adventure
• Summer Reading Challenge
• Tween and Teen Summer Reading
• Free book coupon
• August 2025 raffle prizes
• Tickets for reading raffle

Programs

I was moving away from theme-specific, big programs before the pandemic and have continued to do so. Our goals for summer reading aren't to get kids reading or prevent summer slide (both doubtful outcomes in my opinion, especially with intrinsic awards) but to get families to visit the library - hence our summer reading programs are built around visiting the library, not tracking reading.

With the focus on library visitors, staffing our service desk moved up higher in the priorities and I don't have enough staff to run the service desk, summer reading (even our simplified programs) and a lot of programs. I've also found that more and more kids are scheduled and our program attendance has slowly faded away. We offer two weekly storytimes June - July and this summer we had some drop-in events, Project Explore and Pokemon Hangout. Our consortium books performers and I have those at our middle school so the summer school kids (and the public) can attend. I also book two performers for the summer school kindergarten classes to walk over and see. I've gotten pressure to have programming in August and ended up just having our program room open for themed weeks - building with cardboard, art, etc.

We do have very popular scavenger hunts that we jazz up a little in summer, at least in June and July, giving away texture stickers/strips and temporary tattoos instead of "just" stickers.

What will change in the future?

I don't anticipate a lot of specific changes for the summer reading program, except that I plan to rewrite a lot of the summer reading challenges so that they correspond with specific sections in the library rather than topics. "Read a science book" instead of "Read a book about a living scientist" for example.

I don't know how programming will work exactly in the future with the changes in our layout. I do anticipate having more drop-in events and probably changes in our pre-summer field trips. There are a lot of changes in our school district this coming year as well that may affect how some things are run.

I do think every year that THIS will be the year we really do displays and the theme, but that has never happened yet... although I do have dreams of a summer reading theme based around the Great Lakes and a freshwater theme - why is it always oceans? I would like to do some more outdoor programs, and by that I mean have someone else do them - I'm not going outside in the heat of the day in the middle of summer - but we'll need to have a fence around our garden area before that's truly feasible.

Read and Grow

Our new Read and Grow wall, painted by former teen aide
and local artist, Bella Cain.

We made some updates to this program when we moved the youth services department upstairs in 2025. It's completely self-run and I don't attach any age limits to it. I generally describe it as a program for kids who are still listeners and patrons are welcome to repeat when they get to the end. It was inspired by the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program.

We attached brochure holders to the wall (other side of the sunflowers) which have folders, extra reading logs, and a small basket with blank caterpillars and strips of stickers. I purchase the folders in bulk from Walmart during back to school season. The "caterpillars" are unfinished wood discs with two holes (purchased from Amazon) and Twisteez wire. Each folder includes instructions, four sheets of reading instructions, two logs, and a strip of smiley-face stickers.

Sample caterpillars on the wall

Link to folder contents on Canva

Prizes

• Colored wooden beads are added to the caterpillar for each two logs completed (which I have just realized isn't actually explained anywhere... oh well, most people have figured it out.)
• Read and Grow plant kit - small clay pot with the Read and Grow logo on it (Cricut stickers) and a pack of seeds.
• Rubber ducky
• Finger puppet set
• Reading bag (sewn by a library patron)
• Reading buddy (I sewed these myself - and I need to make more soon.)
• Free book (donations and Book Depot) and a 3-D butterfly finger puppet, created on the Cricut.

I am very casual about "keeping track" and I don't care if caregivers don't write down the books, use 50 stickers instead of 5, or do the program twice.

You are welcome to borrow and adapt our materials, but please remove the  graphics as they were purchased and are copyright (purchased as part of an iRead program - the artist is Yuyi Morales). For the Cricut files Jessica used to cut the lettering, email her at jdowling@elkhorn.lib.wi.us.

Reading Explorer

This program originated as a winter reading program, which everyone asked for but nobody participated in! I took all the "reading challenges" from that and reworked it into a year-round reading program, 500 books before middle school. I took it down during the pandemic, wanting to rework it as I updated the companion program, Read and Grow, and eventually brought it back in December. of 2022

The program is open to all independent readers; I encourage people to do it after they finish Read and Grow or they can do it concurrently. There is no "completion" so readers can just keep going as long as they want.

They start by picking up a folder which has an instruction/prize sheet and a number of themed reading challenges, with book suggestions for both younger (beginning chapters and easy readers) and older (middle grade) readers. When they have read 25 books, they get a prize. They can get one Reading Explorer bag and up to 12 free books a year and an unlimited number of iron-on patches for their reading bag. I got an enthusiastic response when I restarted this and about 20 kids, half in the 5th/6th grade range and half kindergarten/1st grade took a folder. I now have some specialized challenges for Cub Scouts etc.

You are welcome to use the files, but please remove the Christian Slade artwork, as we purchased that via iRead and it is copyright.

• Instructions, challenges, etc. on Canva

Library in a Box

[This program eventually died out due to the pandemic. I do still supply books to a couple places unofficially and I hope someday to possibly revisit this with official Little Free Libraries.]

We had a large amount of children's books left over from the booksale and I used them to start this outreach I've had in my mind for a while.

My associate covered paper boxes in duct tape and masking tape, I made a sign, and the boxes were packed!

I used donations, leftovers from the booksale, and weeded books to put together the boxes. I also added calendars, flyers, and Read and Grow or Reading Explorer folders. All of the books have a sticker on them that says "Read and share!" and a reminder to visit the library.

Basically, it's a Little Free Library, but it's curated. Each box is set up to fit the needs of the location and we'll be visiting and refilling each month. I've been filling shelves in the basement with books to add as needed. Right now I have three locations and a fourth in progress. These include our two 4k/preschools that are also year-round daycares and summer care locations and a family salon. The fourth location I am working on is a sort of club house by a lake in a rural area.

I have a long list of potential places, but these are the criteria I'm looking for:

• Outside of town (not in walking distance of the library) but still within the environs of Elkhorn
• Places that are regularly open all year round (I am thinking about schools, but later)
• Community locations where kids and families gather
• Ideally locations that target low-income and underserved families

I've tried a couple locations that didn't want a box, which was disappointing, but I haven't given up. I'm hoping to purchase sturdier boxes next year and continue to expand the program. This is primarily an awareness program; We don't get any circulation from this, but the flyers, labels, and reading folders will hopefully bring people in to the library.