Hosting a School Literacy Night

Last night we held our 2nd annual literacy night at the library with one of our schools.  These are always great fun and we have a couple of schools that we currently do them with.  As we were setting up, Julie, one of my awesome School Outreach Librarians, said that we should post this online somewhere as we have become pros at putting them together.  I love them from a manager's perspective as they are inexpensive and bring whole families into the library.  Here is this year's plan:

Setting Up a Lit Night
Start early, especially if they want one in March as a part of "March is Reading Month".  Our calendar does fill up quickly so we are definitely booking our literacy nights by late fall.  Plus, that way we can work our schedule and our programming around the literacy night.  We start by asking the principals.  If you don't have a relationship with your targeted principal and get no response, try either a teacher or their PTO.  For one of our schools, we host a kindergarten only literacy night.  They also have 4 kindergartens at that school so we easily pull in 100+ people on those nights.

Once a school is on board, they will promote the program for you.  Some schools will give extra credit for attending since it is a part of "March is Reading Month".  They will put it on their take-home calendars, their Facebook pages, and some will even create special flyers.

Your job is to book your space.  We prefer to host them in our children's room, but at our branches, we need to hold the program mostly in the meeting rooms due to space (such as in the case below).  We set our program up as stations so parents can come and go during the 2-hour block, depending on when they get home from work, eat dinner, etc.  There is some prep work in getting the stations ready.  While our stations are mostly focused on literacy, we do throw in some STEAM.

Our Stations
As people enter the room, we set up any drawings that we have going on.  Sometimes it is a "Guess How Many Legos" container, while other times they need to just write their name on a slip.  This year we gave away extra summer reading books in bookbags that we had leftover.

Our next station was a Pout-Pout Fish reader's theater.  Kids had to make their headbands, then act out the words.  We used sentence strips to make the headbands and glued fish die cuts to them.

We have been using The Day the Crayons Quit a lot in outreach this spring. Some of our outreach adventures have involved a craft so we had bulk ordered a bunch of chunky crayons.  You can make your own crayon guy to go with the story by adding googly eyes to the crayon.  Kids then wrote a letter or draw a picture as to why their crayon shouldn't quit.

 
Our fourth station was an engineering challenge.  We cut pool noodles into 1-inch pieces and kids built with the noodles and toothpicks.  This station also had some older kid appeal.

Have you ever played Race to 100?  This is a math game using dice that also has older kid appeal.

  

To get the families out in the library, we had a scavenger hunt for children's book characters.  We like to use characters because it gets kids talking about books.  As kids finished the hunt, they got a CMPL pencil.

Our last station was out in the children's area.  Kids made books based on Press Here by Tullet.  They folded 2 pieces of paper in half to make their book.  Then they chose a new verb out of our container for each page and added both words and dots.

While this wasn't part of our original plan, it definitely will be in the future!  The school asked if we had a place to hang artwork since parents would be attending with their children.  We have racks that we moved over to this location and they brought their artwork to display.  It was very eye-catching. 

This is what we did this time around for our literacy night.  It was an Amy and Julie production (my 2 School Outreach Librarians) and I just went along as an extra set of hands.  If you haven't done one before, it is totally worth it! 

School and Public Library Collaboration

This past summer I took part in ALSC's Mentoring program.  I was looking for ways to get involved in ALSC and this was a great way where I could give some of my experience while learning something.  I was paired with a LIS student and we were both interested in different aspects of school and public library collaboration.  After some discussion and pointing her to  great resources, we decided to run a survey so she would have a larger pool of information.

The survey ran in July 2014 and we pushed the link out through Twitter, various Facebook groups, and people we knew.  Here are some of our results:

• 98% of those surveyed work with their local schools.
• 76% of those surveyed have collaborations that take place at both the school and the public library. 15% take place only at the schools and 6% take place only at the public library.
• 63% of those surveyed have 2 or less people who work with their local schools.
• When asked how often they work with local schools, 23% said once a week, 39% said once a month, 7% said once every 6 months, 9% said once a year, and 22% said whenever they could fit it in.
• Ideas for working with local schools include booktalks (46%), story times (60%), field trips (60%), summer reading visits (80%), library instruction (33%), and other (41%).

The two of us each had a favorite question asked.  My favorite question was “What is your most successful program run with local schools?”  For me, it was an opportunity to see unique ideas that work.  In addition to some more common ideas, such as booktalks, story times, and summer reading visits, there are some great things being done in libraryland.  My favorites that I would like to try and incorporate in my library system include a kindergarten kick-off, a “We sign you up” program for school employees for new library cards, a school bag service, and school literacy nights.

My mentee's favorite question was “Have you incorporated technology into any programs run with your local schools?  If so, what types of technology have you used and how have you used it?”  She was very impressed with the types of technology incorporated into collaborative programs.  Many of the responses included working with tablets (iPads), eReaders (Kindles), and Web 2.0 tools such as Skype or Prezi.  Fun ideas included having a Techmobile visit local schools, using Prezi with school tours, and a virtual tour of Overdrive.  Plus, one library is giving all of their local high school students e-access cards so they will have access to all of the library’s databases.

So what next?  It is 3 months after our project and I was able to use this information in creating this year's goals for our department.  As a young library system, we tended to have a hit-or-miss relationship with our schools.  This year we are doing more targeting and the relationship has become a higher priority.  Here are some things we have or will be accomplishing:

• We will have a position created and this person will be responsible for coordinating all school collaborations.  With 47 schools, it is easy to get bogged down or lose track of what we did and where.
• We started a teacher enewsletter that is sent out bimonthly.
• We have spoken to local PTO's and have gotten on the agenda for teacher development days to talk about the library and what we can offer.
• We will be visiting local middle schools during conferences to sign kids/teens up for library cards.

While we're not there yet, we have definitely gotten a good start this year.  I am looking forward to seeing the results!

Summer Reading and School Participation

This was a very wonky year for our summer reading program.  It was my first year coordinating the program across all three of our locations.  Also, we had a big millage vote (which passed!) and we had to back up our program 2 weeks to coincide with the vote.  This was not the year to make any major changes to the program.  Since I was coming at the program fresh, I did have some ideas that I wanted to try so I conducted a bunch of experiments.  One of my experiments had some awesome results!

On our third week of summer reading, I ran our participation stats by school.  We have 45 schools in our service area and 197 different schools who had students participate.  Since I am a stat nerd, I also made a table of the top ten schools in Excel and posted it on our Tumblr page.  Our community relations person saw it and posted the same chart on our Facebook page.  At this point, this little chart became a BIG DEAL.  We had parents asking why their schools were not on the chart.  All of a sudden, we had a competition!  Participation numbers were going way up.  Schools in our service area who had low participation, now had high numbers.  People asked in the library how their school was doing, which meant that we now had to run the results weekly and post them.  This all happened because of social media and the spirit of competition.

So how much did our participation rate go up?  Many of our schools increased their participation between 40 and 60%.  This cost me no money to do this year and took less than one hour of my time to run the report and post the numbers online.

Now that we know that this works, we are actually going to advertise a contest between our schools next summer with a prize.  I also want to come up with a better display to promote the school competition in our buildings where I can visually represent the numbers better than my Excel spreadsheet.

Public Library and School Partnership Survey

As a part of the spring/summer ALSC Mentoring Program, my mentee is really interested in school and library partnerships.  We've looked online at various blogs and I have shared my experiences, but now we can use some help.  If you have 5 minutes, please take our quick survey and we will share out any results.

Thanks!