Egads what a busy summer!!
Hey guys! Well I don’t know about you, but if your summer was anything like mine, I’m thinking we’re all starting (haha! Who’m I kidding – totally gone already!) to go crazy!
I’m curious….once more I’m going to assume that we all offer some form or aother of that much loved (and surprisingly old!) Summer Reading Club, but I’m wondering what kind of programing you offer your kids, and do you do outreach to local camps as well??
Let me know.
At my location, in addition to the SRC fun, we create a bunch of programs that revolve around the SRC theme (though they’re entirely separate programs and I think a TON of people get really confused when they’ve signed up for hte cluba dn then think that they’ve signed up for our programs….le sigh).
At my branch there are 2 YSLs including myself, and we offer(in addition to our core programming and outreaches) 2 summer programs a week as well as about 4-6 camp outreaches over the 2 summer months.
Personally – I’m going to sound a bit bitter now – I’m thinking that we don’t have nearly enough staff to help cover all the times that we need to be off-desk in order to get these programs running, not to mention, I don’t really get the whole going to camps thing. Seriously, if I was a parent I don’t think I’d be too impressed that the camp I’m paying my child to go to then turns around and gets free programming out of the library – we can’t even really promote the library during these outreaches and they’re usually rather insane groups to begin with. Again, that’s my opinion…feel free to disagree!!
Actaully, please do disagree! I feel so cooped up after this summer that I’d love to dig my teeth in it!! =D
Oh – and did you guys see this article about that oh-so-hilarious book “Go the F**k to Sleep“??? For 
those of you who have sensitive ears, do NOT watch this.
So, what do you think?? An odd predicament, huh? Personally I’m completely against all forms of cencorship within library systems because as soon as you start bringing it in, I find it compicates things unnecessarily…..
Anywho, school starts soon which means a bit of a breather before jumping back into school outreaches. Yay!
Hey Vivien,
We ran 2 programs a week as well as SRC and most of them completely tanked except for the crafts. We don’t do any camp outreach, we just have a staff of 1 YSL and 1 YSLA but I still believe we do too many programs in the summer, it seems teens are really busy in the summer in my area as well, so next year I am definitely going to scale back and look at other things like read off your fines weeks or fewer programs with bigger draws like a big name author visit. I would love to hear from others as well as to what they did this summer and what was really popular. As for crafts our kids seemed to love, cupcake decorating, book art, 3D photo art and expression magnets. Yoga and a smoothie was really popular as well. Sometimes we had a full house with a waiting list and half showed up (even after calling). With programming for this age group I sometimes feel like I am shooting at a moving target. Book selection is easy, for me it is the programming that will get them out that mystifies me..
…and I totally lost my comment due to stupid computers…le sigh. Once more, though a first for everyone else:
Hey Cecilia,
So I guess you don’t follow the SRC theme when you do your summer programming? I sometimes really wish we didn’t because I think it’s a bit limiting – alas. And what age do you offer your programs for? As I mentioned we run 2 summer rpgorams a week – one for ages 6-8 and another for 9-12 years. The 6-8 fills up regularly, weheras the 9-12 is a hit and miss….we could get anywhere from 3-16 kids showing for those ones.
And I’m curious, how many programs/what kind of programs did you offer for teens over the summer? I don’t run any teen programs during the summer other than VPL’s Teen Summer Reading Challenge and a few volunteer programs (cause our teens are always wanting to volunteer during the summer)
And Yoga??? Sounds cool! How did that work, are one of you proficient in it already? Did you use a video…??