Jamie Mercer is the Head of Youth Services at W.J. Niederkorn (Port Washington) Library and shares some extra fun with easy and/or FREE programming ideas/tips.
Back with another Fun Friday!
This year was the first year that our library had a program for El día de los niños/El día de los libros. At first, I had a vision- grand plans for a system wide celebration with multiple programs at different locations, but of course, this takes time and a bigger budget. So we started small. And I am so glad that we took the first step.
Since Día fell on a Sunday this year and our library is not open on a Sunday, I reached out to a local restaurant to see if we could set up a table and hand out complimentary books, program information, and possibly do some card registrations. I wanted to try to reach users that we may not usually see stop in the library. I thought brunch at a restaurant would be quite busy with many people.
The response was overwhelming. The restaurant was so excited, they actually donated one of their banquet rooms to us to use for the celebration.
Inspired by this generosity, I started planning for a larger celebration. I went on a hunt for donations to purchase bilingual books to giveaway. I also started asking around if anyone knew of Spanish storytellers in the area. And I started looking for musicians.
Well, we did not get donation money for books, not for lack of trying, but I did partner with Scholastic and took advantage of their Literacy Partnership Program to get deeply discounted bilingual books to distribute (this is a great resource if you also giveaway books for summer reading as well).
In addition, we had a mother volunteer to help us create a bilingual storytime and read the Spanish for us. We also found an awesome Flamenco studio from the Milwaukee area who did a short Flamenco workshop with the kids.
For marketing we used social media, in-house, and had stores around the city put up flyers. In total we had 30 people. Not bad for our first celebration.
We were also able to get our celebration listed on the Día registry.
Overall, our program total ran under $200 and we still have supplies that can be used for summer reading and/or saved for next year.
The support and participation from the community was phenomenal. We can’t wait for next year’s celebration.
