When I was a frontline youth librarian, I loved thinking of ways to make the SLP experience fun for kids. One year, when the CSLP theme was sports, we put SLP buttons on ribbons, and put their "medal" over their heads while playing the Olympics theme song. Another year, when we had a medieval theme, we "knighted" the kids to recorded fanfare.
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| Tiny Tips for Library Fun blog pix |
More recently (relatively, since I've been retired from FT work since 2015) when we went completely prizeless, each time kids visited the library, they got a sticker to add to a rectangular piece of paper we used to build a robot. In other years, our Friends of the Library sponsored a CSLP-themed adoption if kids reached a certain community reading goal (adopt-a-star; adopt-a-zoo animal; adopt-a-dolphin, etc). Those little extra touches ramped up the fun for both kids and staff. No ho-hum at the library those years.
So I was especially excited to read an ALSC blog post earlier this summer in which Emily Mroczek-Bayci focused on ways that kids could get their prizes as an "experience or interactive prize."
She wrote: "Now that most summer reading programs are in full swing: let’s talk about prizes. There’s many aspects of this conversation, some of which have been focused on before: accessibility, , outcome based prizes, etc. etc. Today I want to focus on experience or interactive based prizes- where finishers don’t get an item but instead get to “do something” in the library. (Another version of “experience” prizes is a ticket or pass to a local museum, a free party, a personalized bookplate etc.)"
To read her list of interactive prize ideas, stop here. [Spotlight on: Summer Reading Prizes. Mroczek-Bayci. ALSC blog. June 12, 2022.]
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