Beyond the Wakefields

I am not a crafty person. I took up scrapbooking one summer but gave up because the pages I created never looked anywhere near as good as the magazines. One of the women who works in our children’s room is amazing with crafts. She can come up with a craft on any theme for any age group and have them all be different. I am the complete opposite. But last year when I went to visit the schools to promote the summer reading program,a girl entering the 6th grade asked, “Are you going to do any crafts?” with a look on her face I couldn’t ignore. She had grown up going to the library and just because she was joining the YA program didn’t mean she wanted to give up doing crafts. And even though I’m totally inept at crafts, I told her I would.

This summer we did crafts on three different days. The first day was duct tape crafts. This in some ways continues the craft I did last year as I bought way too much duct tape and we’ll probably be doing these crafts for years. Last summer we made wallets and roses. The day before Valetine’s Day we also made roses in the YA room and that was quite a draw. This year we stuck to the summer theme. We made beach bags, water bottle holders or visors. We used patterns from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

The second day of crafts was beading. We used pony beads to make penguins and Kenny from South Park. This was very popular and the teens really enjoyed themselves. The patterns for these and many other beading projects can be founds at Making Friends.

The third craft day was Lava Lamps and monkeys. The lava lamps were created out of empty soda bottles, water, cooking oil, and powdered tempera paint. I got the instructions off one of the YALSA listservs. Several librarians have described these as very popular, but I thought they looked rather disappointing. My two teens loved making them though and made about three apiece (We had extra supplies due to the low turnout). The monkeys were made from pipe cleaners and pom poms also from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

Singing

Originally uploaded by Kerers

As our opening event of the summer reading program, we hosted Draco and the Malfoys (with special guest Justin Finch-Fletchly and the Sugar Quills). I would highly recommend having a wizard rock concert at your library. It is a fairly easy program to put on and attracts a lot of attention. Draco and the Malfoys were easy to work with and very talented too. I had seen them before and knew it would be a great way to start off a very Harry Potter summer.

The band brought their own sound equipment and we only had to provide a stage and an extension cord. With help from the Mayor’s Office and DPW, we blocked off the street outside the library and had a party. A bunch of the teens who had registered for the program attended which was great - since they were the target audience - and we had about 125 people total. The predicted rain managed to stay away the whole afternoon.

Feel free to contact me or comment if you want more specific information on this program.

My registration numbers are a little off from last year, particularly for advanced registration.  I suspect that there are several reasons for that.

1. School Visits - I was only able to visit 3 of the 7 possible schools to do summer reading promotion.  At the end of the school year, everyone’s schedule is crazy and I was unable to connect with a few of the schools.  Next year I will start earlier (which will be easier since I won’t be getting married in the beginning of May) and try to contact different people within the schools to get something set up.

2. Registration Dates - Last year the first week that there was no school was the last week of June.  This year (partly due to the schools opening at the end of August) the students got out a full week earlier, but we left registration the last week in August.  The library was packed in the week in between with students getting their summer reading books.  If registration was that week we may have been able to pull in extra students.

3. Summer Scheduling - Most of the parents in this town work and they want their children to be scheduled all day long.  While in the past that may have included sending them to the library (and it does still happen in the after school time frame), many parents are signing their children up for the school summer programs which are both fun and educational and very low cost.  I think they run four days a week for a $10 registration fee only.  Our program, while free, runs 3-4 days a week, but is only for an hour or two a program.  If their attendance continues to rise and mine continues to drop I may have to modify the program to work more inline with these groups.

4. No Hook Activity - As part of the summer reading program we go on a trip.  The trip this year is a Haunted Boston walking tour.  This is a main draw for the program, but we can only take 30 students with us.  Last year, we did signup for the trip during registration.  Many of the students who signed up were students I never saw again for the rest of the summer.  When the trip rolled around, I had to call them to see if they were planning on attending.  Some forgot that they had signed up.  This year I pushed the registration for the trip back until two weeks into the summer program.  I am hoping this will allow students who’ve been coming to the events so far to be the ones on the trip.  While I think this was a good decision, it meant that advanced signup was not as much of a draw as last year.

It’s summer reading time at my library which means I have tons of things to say on this blog but get home from work so drained that doing anything more intensive than Sudoku is a challenge.

My library is one of the many libraries with a very time intensive summer reading program for both children and young adults.  This is my second summer with the program.  The previous young adult librarian had started a fabulous summer reading program which attracted tons of teens to events 3-4 times a week.  It helped to come into a successful program and I tried to maintain her basic outline and add new events to the mix.  We ask that the participants read five hours per week, but we have a very wide range of what we consider reading (novels, non-fiction, comics, internet websites, magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post about the different events I do and the pluses and minuses of each one.