Friday, June 12, 2015

Summer Reading: Week One Recap

Summer Reading is finally here!

Our first week is kinda of slow because we have the oddity of most of our kids still being in school when summer reading starts. Yes that late! Many of the other community libraries started their programs on May 30 and we started last Saturday on June 8. The major school district in our town still had kids school till last Tuesday.

So we made some changes. We usually have a kick-off party at the beginning which 300 plus people show up and try to sign up at the time. It's a bit of a mad house. Without the party, sign up have been a lot smoother for volunteers and staff as patrons trickle in, instead of bombarding us all at once.

One thing we did kick off was our summer long passives. The kids are voting for their favorite superheroes and the teens are voting for villains. Honestly, I thought this was going to be overlooked with all the other exciting stuff going on this summer. I was wrong. I've had in 6 days over 300 votes. So not only is that kids who visit the library and hopefully sign up for our reading club, but also participate and follow directions in our passives




This was an earlier photo but I'm still please to report that Wonder Woman is still leading the votes with a substantial margin. (And no it's not just girls voting for her!)

Kids have to follow the instructions so it's a passive with an application. Votes only count if the kid writes their name and age and only votes for one superhero per ballot. They can vote every time they visit. And if they think I'm not paying attention...I empty the boxes everyday and yes I throw out any ballots that do not meet the criteria. This ain't Tammany Hall.* I run a clean election her!

I've already had one flop. Every weekend we are doing a craft and a sensory bin. I volunteered to make up some of the bins. This morning I put out one full of pom poms and pony beads for color sorting. My co-workers had a make a superhero mask station with markers, stickers....and yeah that was it. Naturally the kids saw to more exciting craft materials and quickly wanted to  use them instead. Normally I wouldn't mind but I was planning to recycle those materials for craft later in the summer and would hate to have to waste money buying replacements.

I put up a sign saying "Please keep the materials in the bin, yada yada" and had to police the area when I saw massive handfuls of pom poms go wandering off.

You know people, I've already had to be bad cop enough this summer and we've just started! I'm sick of telling kids to walk not run. I've had to reprimand our teen volunteers twice. One group already got read the riot act by my co-worker. I feel like I should be speaking in my best Liam Nesson voice.


I decided I didn't want to be bad cop anymore. I just changed the materials in the sensory bin to save myself the headache

*Obscure history joke, humor me....