Saturday, April 11, 2015

This week at the library; or, April Showers

What's happening; in my head and at the library
Final picture of the Bring on the Spring
activity before taking it down for
Culver's coloring contest
  • Back to work. My desk was not as messy as I thought it was. Apparently we had a super busy week last week - we surpassed all our circulation goals, we broke 3,000 in picture book circulation for the month (a first!) and the children's area looked like a tornado went through it. It was awesome. I also had a patron compliment me on the gardening books I suggested last time they were in - they used them to plan their whole garden! My associate did amazing displays which I will be posting with our Under the Sea party in a few weeks.
  • Nobody came to Preschool Interactive, but we did finalize summer reading plans on Wednesday.
  • One of the reasons I have no desire to move up the management ladder is my extreme dislike of phone calls. I made multiple back to back phone calls on Thursday morning. UGH. Need chocolate to recover. Thursday was just annoying, from endless phone calls, to discovering I'd put the wrong time for next week's huge program on all the flyers that had already gone out, to not giving my associate enough information for a project and wasting her time (sorry again Jess) to the massive thunderstorms that dropped attendance at mad scientists club. All compounded by very little sleep the night before. Le sigh.
  • Ok, well that was an...unexpected development on Friday. I have a performer coming NEXT Friday and one of the schools got confused and showed up this morning! So instead of the 15-20 kids I was expecting for Favorite Artist, I suddenly had 100! However, it could have been a lot worse and I was able to adapt fairly easily. Luckily Mo Willems is one of the only two favorite artist programs that uses printables and no paint! The staff and my director stepped up and ran copies and collected every bottle of glue, crayon and marker, I did storytime and I was totally on fire, and then they colored pictures and made paper bag puppets (and I had enough paper bags!). Also, only one school got confused - if I'd had 200 kids I don't know what I would have done! Then the school was having a read-in so that was pretty crazy that evening with everybody demanding books.
  • Saturday - the local ham radio group came to demonstrate and do a "kids' day". I think maybe 20 people stopped by and that's probably generous. The weather was gorgeous and Saturday programs are hard to get people to come to here. Still, they seemed to enjoy setting up. I mostly worked in my office and then did periodic rounds to encourage people to go over there.
Programs
Stealth Programs
What the kids are reading, a selection
  • Talked about the new American Girl, Grace with some girls who are fans.
  • Picture books about blended families - drew a blank and asked on a listserv. Will be compiling a list later.
  • My Weirder School by Dan Gutman
  • Battle of the books list from another school
  • Mom said she liked one of my Civil War books, son was not enthusiastic. I talked up Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales and he agreed to try them (although not as enthusiastically as his mom)
  • A toddler mom mentioned she was reading chapter books aloud and was thrilled to find out there were Little House chapter books and I also recommended Daisy Dawson.
  • Wimpy Kid hard luck - checked out so I offered Big Nate or Nerds. He went with Big Nate but said he might try Nerds later.
  • Read-in requests - wrestling books and I recommended Dragonbreath
  • kid doing a science experiment on whether or not video games relieve stress. i got nothing...had to put books on hold
  • What the dog said by Reisfeld - do not own here
  • Bad Kitty - read-in
  • More read-in. More and more and more!

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