"Green" Thinking and the Summer Reading Program

By: Lynn Mihm, Children's Services at the Sheboygan Falls Memorial Library

The March Booklist Magazine highlighted "the environment". This got me thinking what we can do to "go green" at the library and emphasize the environment to our young readers, especially with the theme we have this summer.

We can start by saving the summer reading manuals, since we seem to repeat the theme every ten years. I have "Summer Splash" from 1988, "Make Waves! Read" from 1998 and now we have "Make a Splash-Read" from 2010. Many of the ideas were repeated, but the best part was that I actually saved some of the decorations from those years. For me this is a very easy year. There is a downside to all of this. One needs a place to store these things, so I am lucky to have my own closet at the library.

We always have a new batch of children, so we can still use some of our favorite old stories like, "Harry by the Sea,", "To Bathe a Boa", "Five Minutes' Peace", "Swimmy", "Sand Cake" and "A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog."

One of the new books reviewed in Booklist was, Written in Water: Messages of Hope for Earth's Most Precious Resource. I was happy to see that the manual and some of the programs emphasized subjects like invasive plant species, invasive fish species like the carp, and catch and release fishing. It also promoted the use of steel water bottles instead of plastic bottles so we do not see plastic floating in our lakes and rivers and filling our landfills.

We should all be doing our part to save precious water.