Summer Events

Summer Reading 2011 has now gone into the history books here at Memorial Library. Readers have turned in their logs and the tee shirt order has been submitted. High readers were rewarded with Grif Golf and a picnic this past Tuesday. Everyone who attended had a fun (but rather warm) time out in the sun, but then got to eat their fill of pizza in the nice, shady picnic area. Our high readers are to be commended. It takes at least 35 hours of reading in the five weeks of summer reading to get into the club. As a whole, Summer Reading 2011 was very successful. Well over 450 young people took part, with 3,522 hours of total reading time turned in between the children and the teens.

The only thing that remains is for everyone to claim their tee shirts, which will take place on Thursday, August 4, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. If your child earned a tee shirt, please mark that date on your calendar. It is truly a shame to have children work for their tee shirts then not have them claimed.

Doing cooperative projects with other agencies is one of the fun things about this job and a great one is coming up. As was mentioned in this column space last Sunday, Mid America Air Museum is bringing an exhibit called Wartime Escape from Exhibits USA to their facility from July 27 to September 23. The library is planning some interesting programs in conjunction with the exhibit. The exhibit tells the story of Curious George creators H.A. and Margret Rey and their escape from Paris just as the Nazi invasion was taking place during WW II.

The Children's department is planning programming to showcase Curious George and will host special programming as well. A complete schedule will be available in the near future. All the events are made possible by a grant from the Kansas Humanities Council.

Once summer reading is completed, planning for fall begins once again. Our storytimes will start on Thursday, August 18. The various ages of little ones will return to their previous groupings: Lapsit storytime is for children birth to 19 months; Toddle In storytime is for children 19 months to 3 years, and preschool time is for children 3 to 5. The session times are just going to be tweaked slightly. Preschool time still begins at 9:15 and ends at 10:00, but toddler time is moving up by five minutes to start at 10:15 and end at 10:35. Lapsit time will then begin at 10:50 and end at 11:10. Storytimes are grouped into six sessions, followed by a break of two weeks before the next session begins. Schedules for the first session are now available both in the library and on our website. Be sure you stop in and sign your little one up.

A lot of parents and grandparents have been in this summer wanting to start their children reading or wanting to know what we have for young readers. Our easy reader collection used to be shelved in the center of our easy books. Since the installation of our bins for easy books, the easy reader collection has moved. It is now located on the west side of the first set of north-south running shelving. A lot of the books have the reading level right on the spine, making it fairly easy for someone who has a little time to invest to locate the level of books they are looking for. However, using the card catalog could prove to be a more efficient way.

Once in front of the card catalog screen, click the 'advanced search' button. This allows movement to the center column and changing of the blue word location from 'Liberal Memorial Library' to either 'Children's Area' or even, in this case, 'Easy Reader Books'. Once you have done that, type in 'I can read'. If you want a specific reading level, you can type in 'level 1, for instance following the 'I can read'. For those who are in search of the very first readers, type in 'My first I can read'. Library staff members are happy to assist patrons in locating materials or with any questions they may have. There are a lot of great titles in this section, with new titles arriving regularly. Stop in and check out what we have. See you at Memorial Library!