Summer Reading Club started last week! Which means... we have been busy! (In fact, I meant to post this last week, but that was not to be.)
I was super anxious about Summer Reading starting this year, in part because we were doing school visits almost every day in May and I felt like I didn't really have any time to prepare. When the first day came around I did NOT feel ready. But guess what? It was okay. We had everything ready that we really needed and we were able to get to everything else throughout the next couple of days.
Now, we're a week in and we have over 1000 kids and over 300 teens signed up for the Summer Reading Club. They're starting to read and log their books. And, of course, they're coming in to ask us questions!
We keep track of questions we're asked for stats and to help with collection development and trends. Normally, our questions for the entire day fill up half a sheet or maybe one whole sheet. During the summer, we regularly spill over onto the back page (or sometimes more!).
These pages are from a couple of days last week, the first week of the Summer Reading Club.
Programs are hopping! We had a big performer last week (the first week school was out, which ended up being a mistake - our crowds were too big for our room!) and our weekly storytimes are back this week. I really try to go light on programming the first week of Summer Reading Club because as the kids get out of school, we have SO MANY coming in and we need all hands on deck to answer questions and help people get signed up.
(Life is SO much easier since we switched to doing the Summer Reading Club online several years ago, but we still get questions!)
One GREAT change that we made this summer is that we have made all of our summer programs drop-in and many of them are all-ages this year. Not having to deal with registering patrons and getting all their info (and then at some point having to turn people away when the programs fill up!) had made life easier, too.
I am all about making things easier this year. :)
Of course, we librarians have started our summer reading, too!
I love showing off our own reading so that kids can see that we're participating. They may see something that looks interesting on our "reading log" and want to check it out, too! Since we generally can't meet for our Reading Wildly meetings due to the traffic in our department in June and July, this is a way we can still share what we're reading with each other.
We have been seeing a lot of our booktalking kids come in to the library looking for books that we've brought to their classrooms throughout the year. Even if they didn't come in right away, many have been storing up ideas and are now seeking out these titles as they come in with their families.