We hope you’ll join us again for summer reading next year! See 2024 highlights below.
Kids
More than 2,000 kids (ages 2-rising 6th grade) participated in Adventure Begins at Your Library this year, once again earning beads and stickers to celebrate their reading goals. Between our three buildings, the Book Bikes and visits to summer school programs, we distributed more than 20,000 beads this summer! Kids logged 1,347,579 minutes of reading… that’s over 2.5 years worth of time.
While younger children tallied the picture books read to them, independent readers had a goal of 20 minutes of reading per day. Research shows that without regular reading practice over summer break, students can lose a significant amount of the learning gains they made over the previous school year. Remember, all reading is good reading! If your child thrives with audiobooks or graphic novels, this is not cheating and helps strengthen language processing, as well.
We’ve put away the beads for this year, but can’t wait to see your excited readers back for more next year.
Teens
Eighty teens participated in our summer bingo challenge—more than double the participants last summer. Next summer, we’re aiming to have at least 125 teens join the challenge.
Fourteen teens won prizes including fidget spinners, snack packs, trendy buttons, and trendy keychains. All bingo winners entered a raffle and one person won a $20 Chipotle gift card.
Adults
Adult summer reading participants earned badges by participating in a variety of library activities, such as reading or watching their favorite title, attending library programs, and using resources. The more they interacted with the challenge, the more chances they had to be selected as a prize winner.
In all, 510 people age 18 and older completed 609 activities, logged over 5,000 hours of reading (320,870 minutes), and earned 900 badges.
For every virtual badge a participant earned, their name was added to a drawing. We’re delighted to report that five lucky winners will receive a $100 Oak Park-River Forest Chamber of Commerce gift card to be used at a wide variety of local businesses.
