summer reading club

This summer, our library gave away paperback books as summer reading club prizes, rather than the usual cheap, lead-containing and/or choking hazardous toys. Over all, the response has been very positive, and it’s been interesting to see which books of those we selected have disappeared fastest.

For our independent readers club for up through fourth grade, we offered the following choices (plus a few extra titles we had hanging around due to Baker & Taylor errors—forty copies of The Secrets of Droon #32 was a tad excessive). Bold indicates that we’ve run out since the prize-giving began last night.

• Camp Babymouse (Holm & Holm)
• Case of the Missing Monkey (Rylant)
• Diary of a Fairy Godmother (Codell)
• The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter (Christopher)
• It’s Disgusting and We Ate It! (Solheim)
• Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (Coville)
• Laugh-eteria (Florian)
• Marley: A Dog Like No Other (Grogan)
• Millicent Min, Girl Genius (Yee)
• Minnie and Moo Save the Earth (Cazet)
• Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money (Curtis)
• Rotten Ralph Helps Out (Gantos)
• The Secret of Platform 13 (Ibbotson)
• Stink: The Incredible Shrinking Kid (McDonald)
• The Water Horse (King-Smith)

For our read-to-me club, we offered the following choices until our selection got so limited we had to run to the bookstore for more! (We issue these prizes all summer. Instant gratification for the preschoolers, baby!) The most popular choices are bolded.

• Best Friends for Frances (Hoban)
• Biggest, Strongest, Fastest (Jenkins)
• Buzz (Wong)
• Dinosaur’s Day (Thompson)
• The Gingerbread Boy (Egielski)
• Hi, Fly Guy! (Arnold)
• Little Red Riding Hood (Marshall)
• Make Way for Ducklings (McCloskey)
• Mama Cat Has Three Kittens (Fleming)
• Margaret and Margarita (Reiser)
• The Mightiest (Kasza)
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (Steig)
• The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Galdone)
• Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (Aardema)

Okay, so nearly all of them were very popular. Gingerbread Boy was the runaway winner (ha ha), but the rest were all depleted at a pretty even rate.

The middle school/junior high club, which is funded by our Friends of the Library, had $8 Borders gift cards as the prizes—about the list price of a paperback book. A pretty sweet deal, I dare say.

I don’t expect every library to have prizes these nice. It isn’t cheap, even taking wholesale prices into consideration. But since we do have the money in our budget, I think it’s a nice route to take.

No cohesion to this entry, just pure, unadulterated brain-dump in list format.

1. In spite of my worries, the aftermath of Summer Reading Club has not been bad at all so far. One of my coworkers made some great signs warning people of the club's approaching deadline, not to mention a banner that hung all summer with the beginning and end dates. They seem to have helped. We've had relatively few stragglers, and no problems that I've heard about. Both our membership and completion rates were up from last year, which is cool.

2. Publishers Weekly Children's Bookshelf has a new op-ed feature. This week's entry: When YA Might Not Be OK. Librarian Shannon Stevenson tackles the question of how to respond when middle grade children ask for books with mature themes. My personal approach is more hands-off but similar in spirit. If a parent's doing the asking on behalf of a child, I'll be very forthright about mature content, in a "Just so you're aware..." context. If it's a kid, I'll say with a certain amount of significance, "That'll be in the high school section..." But I leave it there, figuring that the book will go over their heads and/or that parents will do their job.

ETA, 8/8/08: More reactions to the article at...

• A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy
• Read Roger

3. I've obtained a rental copy of Breaking Dawn so that I can see for myself what all the fans are complaining about. So far I've kept myself spoiler-free. I hope this doesn't devour my entire weekend.

4. I'm registering for SCBWI Wisconsin's Fall Retreat. I'm both excited and nervous about the prospect. I've never been to a big (um, or even small—so this feels big to me) writing event like this before. I'm excited because I'll get to meet other writers, including Julie Bowe, who's been nothing but sweet to me in answering lots of my questions the past few months. I'll also get to meet my agent in person. I'm nervous because I have to get a 10-page manuscript sample together for critique, and I have to figure out how to get to Racine, preferably without driving.

Our summer reading club ends this weekend, which always creates a bit of anxiety for me. This is the moment of truth, for our reading club members and for us, too. For the members, did they meet the club goal in order to receive their prize? And for us, what can of worms have we opened by incentivizing reading in this way?

This is the time when we hear all kinds of excuse from parents why their child could not meet the reading goal. Said child was on vacation with the family. Said child had summer camp. Said child read very challenging books. Or, most frequently, "But my child read Harry Potter!"

There is no question that by setting a flat goal for all members (unless parents make special arrangements at the beginning of the summer), the club is not fair. Some kids are strong readers, others are not. Some kids read books way below their level, others stretch above. Some kids have five million structured activities, others have none. Yet we ask the same thing of each of them: to read eight books in ten weeks. It is not fair, in the way that very little in life is. But it's the best solution we've come up with so far.

I don't like making reading a numbers game. It doesn't seem right to say, "Read one Harry Potter book if you like, then read seven easy readers just so you can meet the goal." (Members can, of course, do so.) We praise all the members who report on their books, regardless of whether they will meet the club goal. There are small prizes along the way, too. But that final prize becomes larger than life in the eyes of some parents.

That's when we end up with situations that are stressful for staff, humiliating for the children, and... I don't know what... for the freaked out parents. Fortunately, it is not anything close to a majority of parents who do this; it's really only a handful, but they make themselves memorable. They hold their child's reading log in your face (as the child stands close by, staring at the ground), inform you that little Johnny/Susie worked really, really hard to read those two books, and waits expectantly for you to say, "Yes, of course, just because you asked, it's perfectly all right if Johnny/Susie gets the same prize as the children who followed the rules and met the goal."

My supervisor directed our attention to an editorial in yesterday's New York Times, Camp Codependence, about the "affluenza" infecting certain well-to-do parents. They are pushy. They are overprotective. They encourage their children to break rules, both by example and by suggestion.

That's what these particular (and again, fortunately, few) summer reading club parents are doing when they ask the rules to be broken just, apparently, so they can get a prize. If it's unhealthy for the library to incentivize reading through our goals and prizes (a matter of some debate), it's even unhealthier for parents to devalue their children's efforts by placing so much importance on the prize, over the reading experience, that they demand the rules be broken in order to get it.

For its summer reading club, my department puts no restrictions on what kids may read. They don't have to read particular titles or genres, fiction or nonfiction. They don't have to read library books. They don't even have to read in the traditional manner; read-alouds and audiobooks count. The only thing we ask is that books be "right for them," "at their level," etc., and even that's on the honor system.

The lack of restrictions makes it easier for the kids (fewer rules to follow) and for staff and volunteers (fewer rules to enforce). It also taps into that wonderful, literacy-promoted practice known as free voluntary reading, the premise of which is that if people are free to choose their own reading material, they will enjoy reading more, which encourages them to read more and become better at reading. My opinion is that any assigned reading should stay in school; it's summer, for crying out loud!

So, this story from one of my coworkers irked me. She lives in another library district, and she took her 10-year-old son to the library to sign up for summer reading. The library in question requires that members read a certain number of fiction and a certain number of nonfiction books. Moreover, it requires that members spin a wheel to determine which shelf they can choose a book from.

Mom's eyebrows went up, but Son enjoyed spinning the wheel. They went into the stacks and found the corresponding shelf, and Son chose a book. He carried it back to the librarian's desk for approval. Whereupon the librarian told him it didn't count, even though he'd picked it off the specified shelf, because it was a comic book.

Oooh, it makes me mad just writing about it! Graphic novels and comics are legitimate literature that exercises and promotes literacy. I could not believe that after complying with all those restrictions, the boy's chosen book still didn't fit this library's notion of what constitutes summer reading.

My coworker's planning to write to the library director. My hope is that the librarian who shot down the comic book was acting under misinformation. But at too many libraries—public libraries— comics and graphic novels are still the red-headed stepchildren of "real" books.

My library’s summer reading program kicked off this week, after two weeks of early registration. Monday was totally crazy, as kids poured in to sign up and start reporting their books!

I have a love/hate relationship with our summer reading clubs. Mainly I hate explaining the rules dozens of times per day. Couldn’t we just get on the emergency loudspeaker and broadcast the rules to the entire village at once? I’m also not big on the paperwork aspect: filling out registration cards and reading logs, making sure we have plenty of copies of each. Boring!

It’s more fun to talk about what I love. I love how our paperback racks go from stuffed to half-empty as soon as sign-up begins. I love walking into the stacks and seeing kids lying sprawled on the floor with a good book. And I love the kids’ online book reviews.

Kids entering fifth through ninth grade have the option of reporting their books on paper or online. We approve the reviews before they show up on our website, but we don’t correct them beyond the spelling of title and author (so the link to our library catalog will work). Some of the kids put a lot of thought and energy into the reviews, making them sweetly earnest. And, very often, they give me a good laugh.

On The Year of Secret Assignments, by Jaclyn Moriarty:
“This stitch in your side, laugh out loud novel, was incredulously entertaining.”

On The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett:
“With the garden an animal lover and a boy who never did anything love is possible!”

On Skellig, by David Almond:
“The defining question in this book is what are shoulder blades for?”*

This year, our prizes are especially nice. We’re fortunate to have a generous budget, so we’re shelling out for paperback books as prizes. The Friends of the Library are funding Borders gift cards for our oldest club. It’s very nice, from a conservation and literary value standpoint, not to be buying a bunch of made-in-China, possibly-lead-filled toys.

I’ve enjoyed reading Abby the Librarian’s posts about her library’s summer reading club prizes. Kids’ incentives include ringing a gong and putting a book plate in a library book of their choice. How fun is that?

Does anyone know other libraries who are veering from the junky toy route this summer?

*I found this especially hilarious because Skellig is one of those books my coworker J. and I love to hate. I’ve actually read several of David Almond’s books, so obviously I have some tolerance for them (or I’m a masochist—jury’s still out). I think it’s that I love the concepts of his books, but I get bogged down in the execution. They’re just a bit too weird for me.

J. and I have a running joke about Skellig and David Almond’s other books, which I pretty much blame on this sentence from Booklist’s review of The Fire-Eaters: “For anyone who loves words, Almond's books are a pleasure.” To which I say: “ORLY? I guess I’m a big ole word-hater…”