Registration has opened for this year’s summer reading club, and there were already 70 people registered when the paper went to press.
“We are continuing on with our virtual summer meeting club, similar to last year,” says Chris Norbury, Children’s Librarian. “Last year we had approximately 80 to 100 craft kits that we delivered to people’s homes.”
He says there are typically two types of registration. One group of people is the ones who are looking to do the crafts with their kids at home. “When they register they can choose the weeks they would like to see crafts for, which are based on different themes.”
The other group are the readers. “The club is to promote literacy and reading throughout the summer,” says Norbury. “We have multiple incentives for Children and Families, such as weekly prizes they can win. Brag tags or necklace charms for every hour they read. And at the end of the year they, we have our products jobs as well. So families and kids have two ways they can participate. We are still hoping that if restrictions is up we have a entered your voting ceremonies, bring back a little bit of normalcy, but we are running it virtually this year. One of the challenges with the current restrictions is that, when we do these events in the library, it isn’t uncommon to see 50 kids at an event, plus parents and staff, so we could be in an organizational nightmare. That’s a challenge that, once restrictions are lifted we could avoid, but the in-person portion could be a nightmare. We’re going to stick with the virtual program. Even if the government opens up there are still people who are not comfortable coming out of their homes and being out and about in large crowds. And it would be very hard to run both an in person program and a virtual program at the same time there I think there’d be a lot of confusion and chaos. So we’re going to go into it with the plan that we’re going to do it virtually. And then, we hope that at the end of August, we will be able to do a closing ceremony.”
The library gave out over 5000 craft packages last year, and they expect it will be as busy this year. “Additionally we’ve teamed up with the Community Centre’s Play Escape program this year. We are not offering an in person program, but the Community Centre will be, and we are going to be offering the program to them daily, where we’ll have our crafts, and we will instruct them on how to construct them. So we do have that element to the program.”
In addition, every day, the library will be posting How to videos of the crafts, along with multiple stories read aloud by the summer students. For people who don’t have computer access, they will get an instruction sheet with their craft package delivery.
For people who would like to help, they are invited to donate prizes or read a story for the kids which the library can post to their page. “If they have something that they feel that they would like to teach we are developing programs for adults right now,” says head librarian Paula Coutts. “We’ve got a gardening program, for which we have four videos posted so far on our YouTube channel.”
More than in the past, the library is dependant on the participation of the community. They were able to get three summer students through the Canada Summer Jobs program. They also have a substantial donation from Meikle Wind for books to support the reading club, and another donation from Conuma.
And for people who are looking for books but are unsure what to get? The library has created easy-to-use reading packages with a week’s worth of books in them for every reading level.
And for people who are still not convinced that it’s safe to leave the house, the library is offering home delivery of books as well.
SIDEBAR
The Importance of Summer Reading for Children
Chris Norbury
In a study last year published in the American Educational Research Journal titles: “School’s out: the role of summers in understanding achievement disparities” showed that students between grades 1-8 lose 17-34% of the previous year’s learning gains. For reading this means children can lose 1-3 months of reading skills over the summer break. Oxford Learning claims “3 years of reading skills can be lost by students by the end of the 5th grade”.
How can you help overcome this reading loss in your children? Ideally children should be reading 30 minutes a day, but it is okay to start at any length. Try to make it a part of their routine, before bed, after dinner, before they get screen time. If your finding resistance to reading it may be attributed to interest, and/or reading ability. It is important to find things your child is interested to read about. Do they like cats? Dragons? Are they silly, do they like something scary? A boy may not want to read Dr. Kitty Cat but might love Diary of a Minecraft Zombie. Finding something they are interested in may help overcome reading level issues, but I would still try to keep the reading level to what they can comprehend. If there are too many words that are beyond their level it may be like reading a story where every other word is blacked out. If traditional chapter books are not engaging enough, Graphic novels are becoming a popular option for children today. 100 words read in a chapter book is the same as 100 words read in a graphic novel.
With the Tumbler Ridge Public Library’s Summer Reading Club, we promote reading by offering incentives like chances to win prizes and the ability to earn necklace charms to help your child continue reading over the summer. The Tumbler Ridge Public Library’s TD Summer Reading Club is free to sign up and we would love to help. The most important thing is encouraging your children to read over the summer. The great thing about books is you do not need to charge them, and they fit in a backpack to take anywhere. You might need a lamp, but that is all the connecting you will need.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
