Summer Library

Greetings! School is winding down quickly. Soon it will be summer. Do your students read over the summer? Where are they getting their books? Do you have a public library in your town for them to use? If you don’t have these resources for your students to read, what are they going to do? At my school we open up the library for a few hours once a week in July. We call it Summer Library. We do this for a few reasons. Our school is located in College Place and many of our families live in College Place. The public library is in Walla Walla. College Place residents must pay a large yearly fee to use the Walla Walla Public Library, and very few are willing and able to do this. Another reason we open our library is simply because a number of families prefer our more conservative collection over the public library’s collection. The public library has some wonderful books, but most parents do not have the knowledge of children’s literature to make appropriate choices for their children and it can be overwhelming. It is much easier and less stress to come to our school library and check out. A third reason we open the library is that I have an assistant who is willing to be here on those days and operate Summer Library. We have a few students who come with their families on a regular basis, but when no one is in the library, we can get a lot of work done. What about you? Is this something that might happen at your school? Maybe this is not an option at all for you. But many teachers do go work at school in the summer. If you do, would you be willing to be at school on a particular day each week and let students come in to check out? I have no idea if this idea would work for you, but I thought I would give you something to think about. Holding Summer Library may sound good, but not be feasible for you. Here are some other ideas. 1. Consider making a summer reading list. Parents can easily find the books at the public library and may even check out books for themselves while they are there. 2. Challenge students to read a certain number of books over the summer, or to read a certain number of minutes a day. Provide reading logs for them. 3. Hold a book swap so students can get ‘new’ reading material for summer reading. This is really pretty easy and also FREE. 4. Send out a weekly email to your families with book ideas and reading activities for summer. Maybe you can sneak in a few fun math challenges, too! I hope some of these ideas sound interesting to you. If you are interested in holding a Book Swap, you can get more information on the internet, or go to my blog – sdalibrarian.blogspot.com – and you will find a post or two (March 2010 and January 2011) about Book Swaps. Have a great week. Audrey