Digger Day

I’ve seen a couple similar posts in the past few weeks and I think most of my fellow public librarians understand – I’ve hit my summer reading wall!  I’m thoroughly exhausted and am tired of trying to keep everything in the same theme!  Thankfully, last night was our last “big” program for summer reading!!!  We only have a few more smaller programs to get through and we can begin focusing on fall activities.

We hosted Digger Day last night and although the crowd was smaller than I had hoped it would be, it turned out to be a great evening!  To kick-off the evening we had about 10 middle school students perform to short reader’s theatre skits that focused on our theme (Dirty Gert by Ted Arnold and the classic Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr.).  They also were great sports and did all the hand motions for The Green Grass Grew All Around.  After our skits were finished the entire crowd walked out to the library’s front yard to watch the big diggers plant a tree!  We were lucky enough to have a tree care company in our community not only donate their time, the diggers, but also donated the tree for us as well!  The young kids were very impressed by the diggers – especially getting the chance to see them at work!

Afterwards the crowd was invited to taste our Edible Book Contest creations.  For the past five years, we’ve offered an edible book contest to our summer readers and their families.  The only rules – it has to be edible and somehow related to a children’s book!  It’s great because we give all the kids a small trophy and superlative and then the creations are used as refreshments at our final program!

Summer reading is (finally!) winding down and I can’t wait to get started on fall programming and hopefully cross a few things off my to-do list that have been sitting there since June!