Well, the Preschool Fair was last night. I think it went pretty well and I am mostly glad that it's over. Attendance was not quite as high as we've had in the past and I made some organizational mistakes with the layout of the tables. For my first try, I think it went as well as I could possibly have hoped.
The preschool reps gave me some feedback and hopefully we'll be able to do it even better next year. We had 22 schools come and they brought really neat displays for their tables. The cookies were greatly appreciated (especially by the under-5 crowd). I have to wonder if part of the attendance issues is just the age of the population. My boss reminded me that the reason we do the preschool fair is for our patrons, not the preschools. And that kind of brought it all into perspective.
I'm starting to feel like my programs are cursed, though. No one showed up for After School Adventures on Halloween (totally understandable), we had light attendance at the PF last night, and today no one showed up for our teen mystery program.
My colleague S and I did our first teen mystery program over the summer. We wrote a script and it was like one of those murder mystery games where everyone has a part and you act out your character and try to find out who committed the murder. It went very well and all the teens had a good time, so we decided to try it again. We've been working hard on the script for the last couple of weeks, so we were a bit bummed when no one registered for the program. My best guess is that it's a scheduling thing. Our school district was off school today, so maybe families went out of town. Probably the kids were just glad for a break and not looking for anything extracurricular to do on their day off.
The good news is that we now have a completed script that we can whip out over the summer for a teen mystery program.
I feel like I had so much time off desk today and yet I got nothing done. Wrapping up everything for the Preschool Fair took a lot longer than I expected (but it is finally done and now I don't have to look at any of that until MAY!). I also exchanged a couple fairly lengthy emails with a lady doing book leveling for a middle school in the area. She's actually not in our library district, but she seems really nice and she's working really hard on this project, so I'm happy to help her any way that I can. I might be getting a list of books to level on Monday... We'll see how that goes.
In other news, it's Friday! And this is my first weekend completely off with no travel and no out-of-town guests in a long, long time. Hopefully a large portion of the weekend will be spent wrapped up in blankets reading good books. Hopefully I will feel motivated to write about them on this blog. On the chance that I do not, check out my GoodReads page.
