Y'all bear with me this week because it's the last week of our Summer Reading Club and I'm behind on writing reviews and, well, you know how it goes.
The good news is that August is in sight! I take August almost completely off from programming. We will have our TSI meeting and our Anime Club meeting in August, but no storytimes. Staff take vacation in August (including myself!) and we use that time "off" to plan for fall programs and start getting caught up on everything that has been put aside during the summer months.
In particular, I'm going to be spending some time weeding in August. I've already picked up my video weeding project again and I also hope to get most (if not all) of our folk & fairy tale section recatalogged. Our folk and fairy tales have really long, obnoxious call numbers that made sense before computerized catalogs, but we've worked out something a little different that I hope is going to be easier for patrons.
We've been doing a lot of thinking about our fall programming. The past two falls that I've been at my job, we've tried doing after school programming and it has had terrible attendance. We've tried afternoon, weekend, and evening programs and have not hit on anything popular yet. Even programs that are super popular in the summer or on spring break (Percy Jackson, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) have absolutely flopped when we did them on Saturdays during the school year. To add to that, I'll have one full-timer in my department off on maternity leave and our teen librarian will be out for medical leave, as well.
This year, we'll be concentrating our school-age programming on winter break when the kids are out of school. I'm also hopeful that we'll continue our partnership with the YMCA Afterschool to visit their kids. Of course, we'll continue our programming for homeschoolers and our baby, toddler, and preschool storytimes. I am adding a little more teen programming - a couple of literary lounges for our summer Teen Literary Magazine kids (who insist that they want to keep going during the school year, though I remain skeptical that they're going to have time) and our Anime Club in addition to our monthly TSI meetings. We'll also be having a Zombie Prom around Halloween. (With the exception of Zombie Prom, I don't think these are programs that are going to take a lot of prep.)
So, August will be a time to think about upcoming programs and start to plan and prep. Of course, we'll also debrief about Summer Reading Club and talk about what we liked and what we want to change for next year.
But first, we've just got to get through one more week...
What are you looking forward to getting done after your Summer Reading Club is over?