Guest Post: 500 Before 15!

This week's blog post and super rad program idea comes to you from Abby Bussen, Children's Librarian at Muskego Public Library!

Guest Post: 500 Before 15

Author: Abby Bussen, Children's Librarian, Muskego Public Library

There's always somebody, right? Somebody who finishes the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten just before heading off to their first year of school whose caregiver wistfully says, "Y'know, I wish there was a program like this for school-aged kids..." Or maybe its the grownup of a 1KB4K kiddo who has an older sibling, and that grownup says, "It would be *sO nIcE* to have a program like this for older kids, too..."

We'd heard those comments enough times that when we saw another WI library roll out a 500 Books Before Middle School program (hi, Matheson Memorial Library!), we pounced! We worked with Angela Meyers at our own Bridges Library System to get a professional logo designed so all the libraries in our system could do a 500 Books program. The logo designer created options -- 500 Books Before 15 (age), 500 Books Before Middle School, and 500 Books Before High School -- so community librarians could choose which range best suited their patrons. We went with the age to keep it in line with our homeschool groups! We also framed our program as a "challenge." For some kids, reading 500 books before they turn 15 isn't easy, so where we spend 1KB4K telling parents how easy it can be to read 1,000 books, we don't do that same thing for 500 Books Before 15. Challenges are good and fun!

I worked with Amanda Hyland, the teen librarian at my own Muskego Public Library, to create interesting tracking sheets and come up with worthwhile incentives for this older age group. Our tracking sheets include 25 lines on one side and a coloring sheet on the reverse. They all just say 1-25 and we have a huge assortment of coloring page designs, so kids can pick their sheets instead of having sheets forced on them. For our incentives, we designed drawstring bags that say "Readers Gonna Read" that the kids get when they sign up -- no delayed gratification here!

We also invested in an American Button Machine button maker, so readers can make achievement badges for themselves after every 25 books read. By the end of the program, they can have 20 unique buttons! We have 3 button options for each page returned: 1) Pre-made buttons for families on a tight schedule; 2) Coloring-page buttons for families with a little more time on their hands and kids who like a little guidance; and 3) Completely blank buttons for families who have time and kids who live to design their own gear.

 

In the 2 months since we've launched this program we have had 99 kids sign up and one eager reader is already up to 175 books!