What We Did on Summer Vacation

We made some fun changes and adjustments to summer this year that worked out swell. Here are a few highlights:

• We again went weekly-prizeless for preschool & schoolagers with positive results. We had robust registration and return visits despite no doo-dads. Instead of building a robot, this year kids got a sticker or two to cover a life-size Darth Vader cut-out. They loved the concept of "defeating" the villain by covering him completely. With three more weeks to go, we expect full coverage-defeat!

• We lengthened our program to a full ten weeks. While it has definitely made the summer months feel longer, we are still seeing outstanding return visits and a longer chance to use the library - earn the ultimate book prize.

• We changed our preschool SLP from monthly activity cards to weekly activity cards. This has definitely brought in more families for return visits and the younger kids have loved stickering up Darth Vader (or themselves!) more often.

• One of our gamecard activity choices was for kids to be superheroes by bringing in kid-nummy boxed meals for donation to our neighborhood food pantry. Summer is traditionally a very low donation time for food pantries and they often have to expend precious cash reserves to keep shelves stocked. We were gratified with the number of kids participating (we've delivered over 300 pounds of food "for kids, by kids" so far this summer) and the deliveries have been greatly appreciated.

• While we definitely had plenty of fun active programs, we also used plenty of stealth (passive) programs to engage kids - Craft of the Week for preschoolers, Kid Lab and paper-covered tables with writing/drawing prompts for schoolagers and DIY activities weekly for daycare groups. It helped keep the libraries a "destination" for fun activites to engage kids no matter what time of day they came by.

Finally, rather than a completely stealth August "continuation" program, we decided to offer a "Backpack Buddies" program. We have six fully-loaded backpacks for different ages. Each time kids check out books in August, they can enter their name in a raffle to be a lucky winner. We are excited to see how this goes!

It will be fun to see the final results of all this change when we shuffle our stats out but all looks great so far!!