Storytime Calendar for September and October!

Storytime is coming back, Storytime is coming back- Hip Hip Hooray!
Well folks, next week will be the start of a new era of Storytimes at the library. As we bid farewell to the dearest dear Ms. Pam, and wished our preschool and kindergarten friends good luck as they move up in the world, we will start our new era of storytimes with some serious MOVIN' & SHAKIN' & WILD ADVENTURING with Ms. Becca! Check out the new Storytime calendar for September and October above, and prepare yourselves for a fun-filled hour next week with the theme JOURNEY: Run, Walk, Skip, Hop, Fly, Row- LET'S GO! We we journey far and wide through a few amazing books and across all kinds of terrain, using our bodies to balance across fallen logs, roll down squishy hills, weave through tall grasses, crawl through dark tunnels- and we might even see a bear- all without leaving the library! Becca will use her years of experience teaching gymnastics- plus a few key pieces of equipment- to start the fall storytimes with a bang!

**and PS: stay tuned for the calendar of after school youth programs soon!**

ICE CREAM PARTY!!!

PHENOMENON: 92,355 MINUTES READ BY KIDS IN OUR SUMMER READING PROGRAM! 

Greetings, folks! I wanted to take a moment to brag about all the voracious little readers in our community, as this year's Summer Reading Program at Johnson Public Library was OFF THE CHARTS. With close to 90 kids between the ages of 3-18 signing up this year, we embarked upon the 2016 Summer Reading Olympics, combining a ton of incentives for reading and exercise, as well as 2 or 3 crafty workshops and outdoor sporting events each week. At the library, the three of us librarians continually found ourselves inspired, awed and validated by the troops of kids crowding our little library, simply beaming with pride as they announced the number of tickets they earned the past week (1 ticket equals 15 minutes of reading or 15 minutes of exercise). In total, we gave out OVER 6,000 tickets for reading alone!
Let's put that number into perspective:
6,157 tickets.
= 92,355 minutes read by children in our community.
That makes 1,539.25 hours, or 64 straight days (and nights) of reading.

It's AWESOME.

As for exercise, we had one family in particular who rode their bicycles EVERYWHERE they went this summer- whether it was to come to the library for a program or to trek over to the Hyde Park playground, and each of the 3 kids in the family earned 258 tickets for exercise- which equals 3,870 minutes! Super inspiring.

The kids were divided into 4 teams upon signing up by using the "Sorting Wheel of Fate" (shout out to Harry Potter fans), and they all enjoyed seeing their team's progress on our giant bar graph which tracked and tallied ticket totals. The bar graph grew and grew and GREW all summer, climbing up the wall, stretching across the ceiling, and starting to make it's way down the opposite wall. Check it out next time you're in the library- we will keep it up for a few more weeks! In the end, it was a VERY close race, but the orange team climbed ahead from last place, and took the gold! We had planned an ice cream party for the winning team, but after all was said and done, we were so awestruck by ALL the kids participating in the program, that we decided to open the invitation to the ice cream party to ALL kids who participated in the summer reading program. And thanks to a quick last-minute grant, we are able to provide ice cream for about 60 people- woohoo! The ice cream party is scheduled for Friday, 8/26 at 2pm.

For now, we are all recovering from the super fun summer mayhem, preparing for a super fun fall program. Stay tuned!