 All right. Welcome back everybody. This is Big Talk from Small Libraries 2014, the third annual conference where we hear from amazing small libraries around the country and around the world. And next up we have Character Quest Book Club for Struggling Reluctant Readers, presented by Hope Decker, the director of the Co-Hawkton Public Library in New York. As the director of the library for seven years, Hope has helped the library grow tremendously in funding, circulation, number of programs, patron visits, and square footage. That's impressive. See, emphatically believes that small libraries are essential to their communities and loves talking about it. So Hope, with that, why don't you just go ahead and take it away. Good morning. I'm really happy to be here. And I'm going to talk about a program we did this past summer called Character Quest. Here are some of the children that participated in our program. And there we go. Character Quest is a book club that we developed to engage struggling and reluctant readers in high-interest books. They have relatable characters and the readers we hope are going to associate positive fun experiences with the books, so they'll continue to read on their own. And what I'm going to do today is talk a little bit about our town, our library, and the program. And our library is very small and our town is very small, so I hope to convey anybody can do this. If we can do this, anybody can do it. I'll spend most of the time talking about our Character Quest program. Briefly talk about the pitfalls and benefits. And here's my email. If you have any questions or you want copies of some of my materials, I'd be happy to send them out to you. Co-Hawkdon is located in a very rural area of western New York. It's in the southern Finger Lakes. As you can see from the picture, we have a lot of hills. It's 60 miles south of Rochester, New York. We're in a village of 800 people and we're mostly surrounded by farmland. There are very few businesses in our town. We have a gas station, a very small grocery store, an elementary school, lots of wind farms. But like a lot of small rural towns, the businesses have been leaving, not coming. So people don't have jobs. They don't have good transportation. There's no public transportation. And libraries are essential to towns like this. In 1977, the bookmobile that used to stop in Co-Hawkdon was in an accident. So a group of citizens got together and started our library. We are chartered to serve 1,400 people. We have an annual budget of 65,000. As you all know, it's not a lot of money and that's for everything. In 2011, we moved from 800 square feet to 6,000 square feet. We moved from this. It's basically an old garage. And you can see some teens reading on the floor. There was no space for programming. Back here, I just wanted to mention, we have a chain of people, the kids from the elementary school, going from our old library to our new library and they passed books down the line and helped us move our children's collection to our new building. So that's our old building. This is our new building. It's a storefront and we have a lot more room. We have 3,000 square feet on the first floor and then another 3,000 square feet on the second floor, which we use for storage. We don't use it for public use. Our summer program. In 2006, when I first came here, we started a summer reading program and because our building was so small, we went outside in the pavilion next to it. As you can see, it kept growing and growing. In 2008, we added morning and evening programs. We figured that the parents who worked during the day would like to come and bring their children to our programs. So we brought more. We had another program in the evening to enable those people to attend. It was pretty much the same program as the morning program. These numbers are just for the month of July. After the morning program, the kids were able to catch the bus to the summer park program and it was right next to the pavilion. So it worked out really well for us and we had great numbers. You can see each year they improved. Then in 2011, we moved. In May, we started the move. In June, we were about to open. The day before we opened, our back wall collapsed. We had to close the library. Obviously, the numbers were going to go down. In July, we were able to be open a limited amount of time and we were able to do our program. But we didn't expect a lot. The next year, though, as you can see, we did not have great numbers and we were really surprised. We expected much more from that year. I evaluated what was going on in our community because our program hadn't changed much from 2010 at all except it was a new location. We are much more visible in our new building so we have a lot more room. I expected big numbers, not small numbers. So I looked at what was going on in the community and I found that the school's summer enrichment program had expanded greatly. That was the morning and then the evening program was hampered by soccer. Soccer used to meet four times a week but they decided just to meet on two nights. One of those nights was the night we had our summer reading program. These two programs were expanding. They cut into our reading program and the library is important. So I wanted to see what we could do to get more people to the library and I decided to partner with our elementary school and we formed a program called Character Quest as a result of that partnership. I met with our principal. There she is. She helped us at our work day and she has been a very supportive partner. She has wanted to help us. Our winter programs in our old building, we wouldn't be able to obviously do it in 800 square feet so we would go to the elementary school and sometimes do programs during the winter there. Anyway, we talked about ways that we could work together and we went back and forth and we finally came up with a plan to have her summer reading camp for struggling readers come up to the library every day. There were some challenges with this though. A lot of kids have a lot of different abilities. There were different interests. There were boys and girls. There's a wide range of ages. It was grades first through fifth grade and also the kids had to walk a couple of blocks to get here. So that cut into our time and on lots of days in New York State, it can get really hot in July so that was a concern. And actually what we ended up doing was the school provided a van for the teacher that came up with the kids and drove the kids up in batches. So the kids kind of hung out while the next batch came up but that seemed to work pretty well. There were some of the benefits where we got a new library audience. We had a lot of kids who had never been to our library, come to our library. I didn't have to do any advertising or promotion so that was wonderful. That was a lot less work. The school provided helpers. There was a teacher. She's texting on this picture but she was very involved. I think she was probably arranging the van, the ride because she was very involved and not one of those people to sit around and text. And here are two teen helpers as well. The supplies were paid for by the school. And another interesting thing is we are going to get actual data from the school. The school identifies the kids on a number of indicators but one of them is their reading scores. So we will have before and after scores eventually from the school. And I think that's really interesting because libraries usually get circulation numbers. We get anecdotal evidence like a child will say, oh, I love this book or checking out more of the same. But we never get actual reading scores of them showing improvement in their reading skills. So I'm looking forward to getting that data. Our primary goal was to have children have a fun, positive experience with books so that they'd want to read more. And I chose books in the series so that if they loved the first book that we did, they would seek out other books in that series. The school's goal was to help children who are in danger of losing reading skills over the summer retain or gain skills. And I definitely think that our goal was met. The children had a positive experience. I heard it from the kids, their teachers, and the parents. Our secondary goals were to form another partnership with the school. We wanted to increase for summer reading program numbers. And we also wanted to get new families to come to the library. I got a few of the children and their families to come to the library. But what I didn't expect was the teen helpers, several of those families of the teens, come to the library regularly now. One of our other partners was the Lions Club. If you haven't partnered with the Lions Club, definitely seek a Lions Club out in your area because one of their missions is promoting literacy. So we're both wanting the same thing in our communities and we might as well join together. They love to help local organizations. They like new projects. Our local Lions Club is very involved with a lot of projects that are from out of the area and a lot of the same thing. So they actually came to me about a month ago and asked if we had anything that we would like to be funded. And we're going to ask for a sign because we still have the vinyl sign, the temporary sign on our front building. And the signs are over $1,000. So I'm excited about that. And they're also always looking for guest speakers. So even if you don't ask them for money, you can get the word out about what the library is doing by going to the Lions Club. Are there any questions so far? I'm going to continue on. But if you want to ask questions, I'll just stop periodically and answer them. This is one of the books we used. We do have a few comments that have come in. Oh, great. One library says that their school district summer enrichment program comes to the summer reading program as part of their official activities. Oh, that's great. And someone else just has a comment that the majority of their elementary school kids are busted and leave directly after school. So it might be a program for, this is a good thing for them. They're getting a new central library coming in and a larger town nearby so that she's going to keep this in mind when that library is set up that it would be easier to do it there. Yeah. We do have a question now. Oh, we have a question. We do have a question now that just popped in. Was this K through 12 or only elementary that you were working with for this program? It's elementary. Well, it's elementary middle school. It was first grade through fifth grade. Okay, cool. Thank you. Yeah, okay. Thanks for the questions. So this book here is Squish Game On. And you can see the little green pieces of paper sticking out. The green pieces of paper is a bookmark that I put all of the characters on. And when we started each book, we went through all of the characters. You'll see that a little bit later on. Our participants are grades one through five. They're children who have been identified by the school as having significant risk of losing reading skills over the summer. And you can see on the floor, there's their bookmarks. We had in each group 10 to 15 children. Actually, we probably had 20 kids signed up in each group, but 10 to 15 kids came each day. They usually walked up to the library with their adult teacher and two to three teen helpers. And they had about 25 minutes at the library. On the really hot days, like I said, they got a van and drove the kids up. Each group met four days a week for two weeks. That's Monday through Thursday. And those who finished the books on their own could bring a form back to the library and claim a prize pack at the end of the program. And that was my sneaky little way of getting new families to come into the library. So the program. I chose High Interest, Easy to Read, Humorous Graphic Novels. And again, they were in a series. The characters were very relatable. They're very flawed characters. They struggle with things that I think a lot of children struggle with. So the kids really enjoyed the books. Week one was Baby Mouse. And week two was Squish, who is a character that's introduced in the Baby Mouse graphic novel. They're written by Jennifer Holm and illustrated by her brother Matthew. I would read the book aloud for about five to seven minutes. They would follow along and then the kids went to different stations and they did activities and crafts. It was, there was a lot to do, but it was unstructured. But it was never chaotic because there was so much to do. And we had helpers to guide the kids as well. So one of the two of the stations would always be a new craft or activity every day. Another station was Activity Sheets. And whatever book you choose, publisher and author websites are a wealth of information. And I'm going to see if I can get to some of these pages. Random House has a great page for Baby Mouse and Squish. They don't update them as much as I would hope. They don't have the new Squish books, but you can see they've got how to draw Squish, Baby Mouse Squish crossword puzzles, a graphic novel, event kit, cupcake recipes. You can, anyway, they're a wealth of information. No, I don't want to close all tabs. Sorry. Okay. Yikes. Technical difficulties. Sorry about this. Okay. So a great resource and I really depended a lot on them. They also have teacher guides and computer games. I didn't use these computer games because the room that we did the program in did not have computers in it. I did use iPads and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute, but this would have been a great thing to do. The teacher guides, even though we're libraries, I thought was wonderful. So Baby Mouse game. You can make Baby Mouse. There you go. It's a little loud, but they're a great resource. I also had a station with books so that the kids could quietly read and look through the other books. They could get hooked on the series. That was my goal. I also had a station with unrelated crafts. I just pulled stuff out that I had extra of, and here they're just coloring read crafts. Okay. Before I get into the actual things that I did, are there any more questions? And I apologize for that really loud sound. I don't know what it was. Someone is asking, did the school get the volunteers? I think she's talking about the teens. That's a good question. Yes, they did. They had a program for teens that was kind of like a leadership academy. So the teens were in training and it was wonderful. Oh, great. Yeah. And someone asks, did you have to buy paperbacks? And if so, did the kids get to keep the books? Oh, that's a great question. And I am sorry, I didn't mention that. The Lions Club donated the books. That was essential to that slide. Sorry. Yeah, but I asked the Lions Club for a donation. I asked them to buy each child each book. So the kids got at least two books. And at the end of the program, when they came to claim their prize path, they would get another book in a different series, but similar to these graphic novels, along with some other little prizes. So they could have gotten three books. And tying along with that, Susie on Twitter mentioned that the Lions Club is a great resource. When her library moved, they donated all the new shelves and gave us money every year. So it sounds like they're a great resource. They are. That's great. Is there another question? Oh, yep, we go on. Okay, go ahead and go on. Okay. Okay, so Baby Mouse. I chose the Nant Scientist book. Baby Mouse loves cupcakes. She is very messy and very forgetful. She has a hard time keeping her whiskers straight. Over here, I made... This is a copy of the bookmark that I printed out for the kids on cardstock. And we went over that right in the beginning. So they looked at that, and it also kept their place each day as we read through the book. I did not show this video to the kids, again, because I just didn't have the technology to do it, but it's a great introduction to Baby Mouse. So given all that information about Baby Mouse, I came up with some activities and crafts to do. Oh, here we go. Baby Mouse, did you clean your room that? Something under your bed smells terrible. I was wondering what happened to that cupcake, moldy cupcakes. So that was something that I used in a lot of my activities. And actually, Baby Mouse's moldy cupcake, I was able to... I actually had moldy cupcakes because I had some leftover from a prize that somebody never picked up, and they had won it in the contest, a plate of cupcakes. They never picked it up. They got moldy finally, and I threw them out, and then I realized, oh, no, I need to use this for my Baby Mouse kids program. I had the iPad out. I let the kids play on it. This was a cupcake-making app, which actually was kind of stupid, and the kids weren't really interested. But now, since November, there's a new free Baby Mouse app. I just discovered that on the author's website. So you could use this, and this might be a better one to use. The first project I did was a pipe cleaner Baby Mouse. I got the directions online. Here's the link. And this required a lot of help from the teen helpers, but the kids figured it out. I love my Baby Mouse here. She looks angry. She looks perturbed about something. But simple. And I used the really big fluffy white pipe cleaners, not the small skinny. We also did a Hershey's Kiss Baby Mouse. Again, very popular because it's using candy. Baby Mouse discovers Squish here, and she's got to do a science project, and she discovers our friend Squish, who's an amoeba from the next book that we go into. But her teacher is very interested in slime mold. So I let them play with slime. And I actually had some slime mold for them to look at and examine. One of my friends posted on Facebook that she had this thing in her garden. It grew out of the mulch in her garden, and I thought it was slime mold. I looked it up. It's dog vomit slime mold, and I let the kids look at it and give it a squirt, and they thought that was cool. Unfortunately, the slime mold got a little crusty. It wasn't as gross and yellow and disgusting as it originally was when it was outside. It kind of looks like bread now or something, but before it was really cool. Anyway, that was very serendipitous. Really simple bookmarks. Glitter glue and the foamy stickers. Real simple. And sometimes the kids like something, just very simple like that. Because Baby Mouse had a moldy cupcake, I made some plaster cupcakes and then let them paint them and then let them dab black paint on it to represent mold. Not everybody made theirs moldy. Actually, most kids didn't make theirs moldy, but they enjoyed painting their cupcakes. Of course, they had to decorate cupcakes, so we did that. This girl here spilled the sprinkles on her cupcake. That was kind of funny. I want to tell you about these two girls. Yesterday, I went to a page turner's competition. It's actually a book reading competition where elementary students read a bunch of books and then they compete against each other and answer questions about the books. These girls are page turners. They participated. It's all volunteer and the kids get really excited. I know the girl in the blue is very enthusiastic about page turners and her team won. I like to think that we helped foster a love of excitement for reading during the summer. This was another project I did. There was a lot of cutting on my part. I made the baby mouse face, cut the nose, cut the bow, and then I bought the hearts. I don't know if I would do it again. Notice she's got wire whiskers. They're all crinkly because her whiskers are always bent. It was a lot of work on my part, so I don't think I would repeat it. It was also hard for the kids to get the whiskers to stay in the glue. You'd think it would be easier than it was, but it just wasn't. This was a good project, though. I gave them different color model magic, which is made by Crayola. It's an air-dry clay and it's very colorful. It's very easy to use. It dries within 24 hours. It's also lightweight. I didn't make the cupcake, though. I got that off of the Internet, but I let them make their own treats, and they had fun with that. Some kids get a little intimidated when it's so open-ended and there's not a lot of instruction, so we had to gently encourage them to think of a treat and mix the colors and make it, but they figured it out. Squish was the natural next choice for the book, the next book. I'm going to break again. Are there more questions or comments? Has everybody heard of Baby Mouse? Is she popular in your library? I will say those of us here at the commission, we've never heard of Baby Mouse. No, I haven't. I have, of course. I keep thinking that now we have new uses for the things you find in the staff fridge. Yeah. Comments from the audience to pass along at this point? Several people who said that the kids love Baby Mouse that she's very popular. We have a question about how much time did you spend organizing your daily crafts, and where did you get all these great ideas? Boy, I probably spend too much time organizing my daily crafts, but because it's something I love to do, it didn't really... I don't even remember. Probably too much time. I got the ideas just from thinking about the character, her character traits, reading the book, the messy whiskers, the multi-cupcake, and I looked at the crafts that we had on hand to see if I could reuse some of that material. Sometimes I just walk around craft stores and think about the book. It's not probably the most time-efficient way to do something. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I did not find a lot of Baby Mouse-specific crafts, but I did find lots of cupcake crafts and lots of mouse crafts, so I used those kind of inspirations to come up with my ideas. But if you duplicated my programs, you wouldn't have to really do all that thinking, so that would be good. Any other questions? Someone asks, did you read every day and did you stay with the same book until the kids finished it? Did they keep reading in the same book and finish the book? That's a great question. The first week I read Baby Mouse and I would read for just five or seven minutes a day, so not a whole lot of time. We did not finish the book, but I let the kids take their books home and I found that the vast majority of them finished that day. So it was exciting. They got to read on their own and I was glad to know that they were excited about the book and couldn't wait to finish reading it. In fact, the kids kept asking me, can I take the book now? We had to wait because I didn't think the books would come back if they took them during the program. Is there any other questions? How did you regulate youths? She said, I have some kids who don't know the meaning of moderation. With the glitter glue, I started off by saying, don't glop the glitter glue on the bookmark. We had helpers. They knew to curtail too much of something and I made it clear that there was one craft per kid. The extra crafts, they could make as many as they wanted. So it was a matter of just reminding them and I had a lot of help, which is luxury, unfortunately not everybody has. Any other questions? Someone's asking, when you get to the end, you will explain the third book as a prize that you mentioned. Yes. I had a little prize packet and the book was in it and some pencils and bookmarks. There's a picture at the end. How did they identify the kids who were at risk to lose reading skill? They used a number of factors. One was the actual reading scores. Another was feedback from the teachers and parents. It's a small school so they would know if that child typically comes back and from the summer break and hasn't read over the summer, the teachers would kind of know. So they got teacher recommendations and used the scores primarily. Great. Any other questions? Should I go on? Yes, please. Okay. Squish. Squish game on. This is book number five in the Squish series. While most of the kids who participated had heard of Baby Mouse, some of them had read Baby Mouse books, nobody had heard of Squish. I chose book five because it had just come out and I had thought some of the kids may have read the other books but probably hadn't read this as it turns out nobody did. Squish daydreams a lot. He's very imaginative. He loves comics. His favorite hero is Super Amoeba. He loves Twinkies. He's a very nice, easygoing kid. And he's got some friends. Here's our Squish bookmark that the kids had and I will show you his trailer and introduce Squish. He's a great character and a great character for this summer's reading thing. What is it? Fizz, boom, read. Come on, Squish. I'll mention here from a technical aspect, sometimes when our presenters share videos, this is just a pure function of go-to-webinar. The sound may not be coming through. For everybody and the video might be a little choppy based on your bandwidth. That's just a function of go-to-webinar and not a problem with what she's sharing. Squish is a microbe and he's an amoeba. Amoebas are these free-form, one-celled creatures. They're in lots of fresh water, water sources, ponds, ponds around where we live. Even though the kids may not have heard of amoebas, they actually probably have encountered amoebas. I had lots of pictures of amoebas around the room so that they knew what amoebas were. We talked about the pseudopodium, which is how they kind of reach out and travel and the vacuoles as they were doing their projects. This is a great book for this year's summer reading program theme. There was an iPad app, and this actually was a little bit better than the cupcake app, but what I had found was that the kids got very addicted to the iPad. Not all of them, but a couple of them. They wouldn't share. They wouldn't do any other work. They just wanted to do that. They didn't want to go into crafts. So I put the iPad away because for the couple of kids who were really into it, it just didn't seem worth it. I borrowed microscope from my son, and I let them look at water from a local lake that a lot of them swim in. So we didn't find any amoeba, but we found a lot of other things, and that was really cool. It's pretty amazing when a child looks under the microscope for the first time and sees microscopic life. They were excited. That was very popular, and I bet you could borrow something like that from a high school science teacher. Amoebas, at first I was really perplexed on how I was going to come up with crafts and activities for the project. There weren't a whole lot of amoeba crafts on Pinterest, but then I thought, well, amoebas are free form. We could do anything with amoebas. So we made an amoeba visor out of the foamy sheets. The kids could cut really any shape they wanted and just glue them down. They used puffy paint on paper mache boxes and made an amoeba box. And again, as they were doing that, I asked, oh, is that a vacuole and is that the pseudopodium and stuff like that? And there they go. This is a very messy craft. Again, with the excess, we just had to remind them not to go nuts. I did a watercolor amoeba, which uses coffee filters, and this one here I took marker and then squirted it with water. Actually, I think that's one of the students. I found that using Q-tips with diluted... oh, it's a watercolor paint kind of thing, worked well. I also, the next group, I used the bingo daubers and that worked the best. That was the least messy, but they still could get some good blending of colors. It was kind of tie-dye-looking. So I would probably go with the bingo marker things. The kids decorated twinkies. At this time, twinkies were just coming back on the shelves. That was kind of exciting because it was in the news after twinkies were off the shelves for a little while. And here you can see some of their creations. Super amoeba, the superhero in one of the comics that Squish likes to read, has to fight mold in the city. So we did a bleach city. I had the kids dip their Q-tips in bleach and they just made designs on construction paper. That's kind of magical when you see the designs come up. So the kids were kind of excited about that even though it's pretty basic craft. Another really easy craft is a photo frame. I could have done another bookmark. And again, I did the Squish. I used ballpoint pens to make the design. It took a lot of time and I am not likely to do something like that again probably. But it's something that the kids enjoyed doing and it's really easy. Okay, so this is the prize pack at the end. This was the form that they used. And it was very simple. I think that most of the kids probably read the book. But nobody came back to claim the prize pack. The kids begged me to give them out the last day and I didn't. I wish I had because nobody came back and that really surprised me. But anyway, that's what I would do different next year. So in conclusion, one of the pitfalls is no one came back to the library to claim their prize pack. But I did get some new families as a result of the program. Another slight pitfall, this girl here is helping this young man with his bleach city and she was a good helper but she had a tendency to do all of the crafts for the kids. So I had to kind of train the teen helpers to give the kids guidance and inspiration but not do the craft for the kids. And some kids really want somebody to do it for them. So it was a challenge but not a huge one. The benefits to our library were numerous. One of the big ones of course was our numbers going up, getting kids excited about books. I think we met every goal that we had. The school got a free program and I think the kids really enjoyed it so I think they benefited as well. And I'm going to just open it up for any questions and again you can email me and I will send you the list of activities. I'll send you my PowerPoints or copies of the instructions. I'll just remind everybody here we're happily taking questions via the Q&A in GoToWebinar and that we are recording and we'll be posting the videos and PowerPoint presentations from each of our speakers to the site starting next week once everybody recovers from today. Do we have any questions from the audience? Okay, we have one question. Were the kids required to attend? Were the kids required to attend by the school? No, it was suggested and lots of kids were invited but they didn't have to come. A lot of kids came for most of the days but didn't come for all of them because they were going on family vacations or something like that or maybe they just didn't want to come that day, I don't know. They were going to programs at school that were a little more academic. They had a phonics session whatever the rest of their sessions were at school so ours was a fun session and everybody was really enthusiastic about coming to our group but the school works really closely with parents and encourages them to allow their kids to come to the summer reading camp and I think for the most part parents are very positive about the experience. That's great. Now on the timing of this, when was this exactly? This was two weeks, right? Yes, I had two groups and each group came for two weeks so it was in July the week after the 4th of July week so it went into August a little bit but it's basically two weeks for each group. Okay, great. Okay and someone is saying did the school feel that the success of the project did they feel really good about it too and did the readers retain their skills? That's a great question. I don't know the actual numbers yet. I reminded the principal that I'd like to be included in that so I haven't seen the actual numbers but the feedback that the school got was extremely positive. The feedback that I got was very positive as well so the principal and I are already talking about doing it next year and she's very enthusiastic. That's great. Someone suggesting maybe bribing the parents with free pizza to get them to participate Yeah, I would really like to get the parents back into the library. I'm not sure what the disconnect was there. A lot of the kids but not all of them come from families that are disadvantaged economically and going to the library is not necessarily a priority so I think that might have played into it. Will you mention again what ages these kids were? Sure. It was grades 1 through 5 so it was probably 7, 2, 10 or 11. And yet they were all able to read the same book? What reading level is the book? I don't know. I would say it's probably a first grade reading level because it's got a lot of pictures. It's a graphic novel. Even if they weren't at that reading level they could still follow along with the story. So that's why I picked a graphic novel. Oh, yeah. And the kids were all mixed in the group. You didn't segregate them by age or anything? No. I was a little surprised how interested everybody was in the books and that everybody followed along. I have a question. Did you find that you obviously had the teen helpers but did you find some of the older participating kids helping some of the younger ones? No, they didn't. They were all really involved with their own stuff. Sometimes it happens in programs but it didn't this time. Okay. Any other questions? Somebody asked was this in addition to summer reading or was this on top of summer reading or instead of? Yes, it was. And that's a good question. Because the summer enrichment program at school and soccer cut into our programs and because parents and kids are really busy they're almost over scheduled, especially during the summer in New York State. This is the good weather time and people are out doing stuff because we don't have a lot of months of nice weather. So I had one activity that parents and kids could do every day that the library was open all summer long and I got a lot of participants. I hired out and got help for that. But that helped our numbers and helped get people involved with the library summer program. That's great. And somebody was asking about the activity she did with the character bookmark? Uh-huh. Can you tell us one more about that? Well, all I did was make the bookmarks and give them out and talk about it. We read through it, just discussed the character traits of the different characters in the book before starting the book. And then sometimes when the new character was introduced in the book we would kind of refer back to the bookmark. But basically the bookmark was a bookmark during our program. Cool. And somebody was saying she thought it would be interesting to try to adapt this to a book club during the school year. Yeah. Yeah, I think you definitely could do that. It's a great idea. And somebody else is interested in all those activities. Do you have some examples of different activities you did every day? Yes, I do. Actually, if you go to the Co-Hawkton Public Library on Facebook, you can see I have all of our activities. I always take pictures of each one. And if you go to summer 2013 you can see everyone. Each week I use the theme to dig into reading. So one week we dug into archeology in ancient Egypt and another week we dug into dinosaurs and rocks and minerals. Also, if you can't find it on Facebook just send me an email and I'll send you the link to our Facebook page. And if you like our Facebook page you'll see lots of other activities that come up. And I'm very happy to share. So essentially you had two groups kind of of kids. You had the kids in this reading enrichment program and then you had the kids in the summer reading program as well. The school had actually two programs going on a summer enrichment program for the whole population. And then they had the summer reading camp for a select few. And that's the kids that came up to our library. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Yeah. And as we mentioned previously today we can't necessarily get to everybody's questions due to our schedule. But Hope has posted her email address there and said that she's happy to take questions via email. And we have been recording this and we'll be posting her slides and presentation after the conference. So Hope, thank you very much for this very informative and it sounds like very successful program. It sounds like everybody who participated had a lot of fun. I'm a little surprised that they didn't come to get their prize back. But you know, if they got that, if they, what they got out of it, they got out of it, that that's always a success. So Hope, thank you once again. And with that, that is going to end session number two for today. And as I said, we've been recording and we're going to take a 10 minute break here. And you'll hear us be doing some sound checks with our next presenter. But at this point, we're on a 10 minute break. Thank you very much. We'll be back in a few minutes.