New York City, NY --Public Library-- August 31, 2007


Their Summer reading theme was, as it was all over the country--Get a Clue. It took me all the way until Pittsburgh before I finally saw the connection with the Nancy Drew movie that came out this summer.

They read mysteries, detective stories. They had an event where they strung yarn across in all different ways to make a laser beam obstacle course and the kids went through it like they were spies. The librarians expected that the kids would want to go through it, like once or maybe twice, but they went through it tons of times. The kids loved it. They also made fingerprints and had a scavenger hunt.

At this branch 450 kids participated and read over a thousand books. This number is slightly up from last year.

In three weeks they’ll be closing down the library to do a renovation so their trying to introduce the patrons to other libraries in the area.

Her favorite books are Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh and Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, about a little boy who was bored and drew on the wall and entered an imaginary world that he couldn’t find his way out of until he thought to redraw his own word, the moon the window and his bed.

They have two children’s librarians working on programming so they are able to come up with all sorts of things. For the Harry Potter opening party they had a secret password to enter, the kids picked rooms from a sorting hat, they made badges for their house, they pinned pig tails on Dudley, they made pretzel stick and icing magic wands.

Recently she read Twilight and Eclipse, by Stephanie Meyer. They all got hooked. The latest one, Eclipse, which she read most recently, dragged. 2/3 of it didn’t seem necessary, but Twilight, the first book, got them all hooked.

No comments: