We have three weeks to go for our Summer Reading Club and I'm starting to wonder if it's too early to put up a back-to-school display. (It is too early. Our kids go back July 31. But next week I will put it up!) July is always slower for us than June. Many of our families take vacations in July and program attendance dwindles. We start winding down our programming and gearing up for outreach to the schools.
Here's what our staff reading "log" looks like at this point in the summer:
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I'm going to need to move this one and start another one, I think!
To be honest, I have not had any patrons asking about books from our log this summer, so I'm not sure how well it worked as a reader's advisory tool. BUT it was definitely a fun way to keep up my staff's motivation to read and to share with each other what we are reading. We'll definitely be doing this or something similar again next summer.
Again, we've had no qualms about the changes to our prizes this summer. We have had some patrons asking about the grand prize raffles they've gotten used to seeing, but no one has expressed any disappointment that we don't have them this year.
Our butterflies have grown up and we released them at a small program mid-June. We took some pictures of their release and have those at our desk for anyone who asks. And our Science Explorers Table continues to be popular. Right now we have a dinosaur activity going on:
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I am seriously considering doing away with our relatively staff-intensive make-and-take craft table and having weekly science questions or monthly science activities out instead. It's something to ponder. I need to figure out how we would keep statistics on it.
All in all, it's been a fabulous summer so far, but I'm looking forward to wrapping up these last couple of weeks and digging into school outreach. I am hopeful that this will be our most successful school year yet in terms of getting into classrooms and connecting with teachers and students.
How's your summer going?
