Here are the basics:
- Kids 0-5 signed up. (In the preschool-kindergarten collaboration kids only participate from sept of last year of preschool to end the kindergarten school year.)
- Books are bagged in groups of 10.
- At certain milestones like 100th book, 500th book, etc. the child receives a prize. Prizes can be things like t-shirts, cds of nursery rhymes, etc.
- At the end of the program, kids get a big prize, certificate, and their picture in a local newspaper.
Example: I contacted the school that does the program. The woman I spoke with said that this is their 3rd year doing the program. They have 240 bags with unique titles (no repeats). This year they have 150 participants. Her school relied on donations for their books.
What I like about the program: It encourages parents to read to their kids and reinforces how important it is. At Oak Lane, I see a lot of elementary age kids, but not many preschoolers or babies.
Questions:
- How practical do you all think this program is?
- Would you bag up books? (I'm thinking that to start I'd have 20 bags and then switch them out every 3-4 months)
- Who would participate? Kids from birth to end of kindergarten? 3-5 year olds?
- Would you divide the bags into levels? Bag for toddlers, bag for 3-4s, bag for pre-readers and beginning readers? Or mix levels?
Overall, I think the program is worth doing. I will see if my Friends group is willing to collaborate and sponsor prizes. I think it will take me a month or two to get everything set up and organized.
The woman I spoke with is sending me an informational packet. Once I get it, I can I make copies and send it on to any that are interested. Let me know!
3 comments:
Cool idea, Anne, and a great way to boost circulation. Just some random comments, here: They did a "bag o books" kind of thing at JEC last summer to boost circ for the summer reading game. Of the 20 bags you would initially fill, would you keep an inventory sheet of each bag's content? Would each book in each bag get checked out or would each bag have a bar code of it's own? Both ways have their pluses and minuses; but to really boost circ, you'd, of course, want to check out each book. It'll be interesting to see how the neighborhood responds to this idea. Thanks for sharing!
Update: I will present the idea to the Friends group Wednesday. I'm crossing my fingers they will love the idea!
Barcodes: Each book will get scanned out. I would keep an inventory list of each bag so that I don't repeat too many titles and can see what goes missing.
How did JEC's effort turn out?
JEC's effort was a success. Each bag was themed around a genre. Some genre's went out a lot, some hardle at all. Circ' did go up noticeably, but I don't have exact figures.
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