Sumer is Icumen In

(Sometimes you just have to go 13th century! This fine blog post title goes back to my Middle English languages roots and I love to murmur it as the lushness of May unfolds inexorably towards summer)

Kids will add stickers to cover Darth over the summer

Here comes summer!

I got totally inspired to write this post looking at all the great non-CSLP/iRead SLP reading/activity logs that people shared on alscl listserv recently. Microsoft Office and free fonts have made it possible for every children's staffer at any library without a designer on staff (that's like 99% of us!) to become a visionary planner and SLP materials design DIYer. It sure helped us!

We love the CSLP superheroes theme and found it easy to design our unique activity cards. Again this year, there are no weekly prizes - only a final book prize for kids who finish four weekly game cards. We are doubling down on our going prizeless/weekly card mojo by wholeheartedly adding in our preschoolers. Brooke breaks down the new preschool program she designed here.

For the school-agers, we loved how we morphed our long-time "experiential-SLP" model (developed  over fifteen years ago at my previous library with my smart school collaborator/colleagues) into game cards and we're sticking to it! Our new additions this year included, at the request of our nearby Salvation Army, a square where kids may choose to donate food for other kids as well as other heroic themes hatched out of the mind of Bryce.

Rather than building a crowd-sourced robot like last year, this year we are setting up a giant Darth Vader at Main and D.V. posters at our two branches. Each time kids return with a finished game card, they get to slap a sticker on Darth. The ultimate goal is to cover (and defeat!) this arch-villain.

To play on the superhero theme, we purchased a large and a couple of small Fathead Spiderman pix. We will cover these with post-it notes, hiding the character from the kids. Each day, staff will remove a post-it and slowly uncover our superhero!

As always, other than a few superhero posters and super hero word balloons here and there, we plan to have kids use Crayola window crayons to be our main decorators on windows during a regularly scheduled program which really brightens up the place. We'll soft launch a few days before the public schools end to help us stretch out registration sanely.

We feel heroically ready for a great summer. How about you?