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We made some fun changes and adjustments to summer this year that worked out swell. Here are a few highlights:
- We again went weekly-prizeless for preschool & schoolagers with positive results. We had robust registration and return visits despite no doo-dads. Instead of building a robot, this year kids got a sticker or two to cover a life-size Darth Vader cut-out. They loved the concept of "defeating" the villain by covering him completely. With three more weeks to go, we expect full coverage-defeat!
- We lengthened our program to a full ten weeks. While it has definitely made the summer months feel longer, we are still seeing outstanding return visits and a longer chance to use the library - earn the ultimate book prize.
- We changed our preschool SLP from monthly activity cards to weekly activity cards. This has definitely brought in more families for return visits and the younger kids have loved stickering up Darth Vader (or themselves!) more often.
- One of our gamecard activity choices was for kids to be superheroes by bringing in kid-nummy boxed meals for donation to our neighborhood food pantry. Summer is traditionally a very low donation time for food pantries and they often have to expend precious cash reserves to keep shelves stocked. We were gratified with the number of kids participating (we've delivered over 300 pounds of food "for kids, by kids" so far this summer) and the deliveries have been greatly appreciated.
- While we definitely had plenty of fun active programs, we also used plenty of stealth (passive) programs to engage kids - Craft of the Week for preschoolers, Kid Lab and paper-covered tables with writing/drawing prompts for schoolagers and DIY activities weekly for daycare groups. It helped keep the libraries a "destination" for fun activites to engage kids no matter what time of day they came by.
Finally, rather than a completely
stealth August "continuation" program, we decided to offer a "Backpack Buddies" program. We have six fully-loaded backpacks for different ages. Each time kids check out books in August, they can enter their name in a raffle to be a lucky winner. We are excited to see how this goes!
It will be fun to see the final results of all this change when we shuffle our stats out but all looks great so far!!
(Sometimes you just have to go 13th century! This fine blog post title goes back to my Middle English languages roots and I love to murmur it as the lushness of May unfolds inexorably towards summer)
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| Kids will add stickers to cover Darth over the summer |
Here comes summer!
I got totally inspired to write this post looking at all the great non-CSLP/iRead SLP reading/activity logs that people shared on alscl listserv recently. Microsoft Office and free fonts have made it possible for every children's staffer at any library without a designer on staff (that's like 99% of us!) to become a visionary planner and SLP materials design DIYer. It sure helped us!
We love the CSLP superheroes theme and found it easy to design our unique activity cards. Again this year, there are no weekly prizes - only a final book prize for kids who finish four weekly game cards. We are doubling down on our going prizeless/weekly card mojo by wholeheartedly adding in our preschoolers. Brooke breaks down
the new preschool program she designed here.For the school-agers, we loved how we morphed our long-time "experiential-SLP" model (developed over fifteen years ago at my previous library with my smart school collaborator/colleagues) into game cards and
we're sticking to it! Our new additions this year included, at the request of our nearby Salvation Army, a square where kids may choose to donate food for other kids as well as other heroic themes hatched out of the mind of
Bryce.
Rather than building a crowd-sourced robot like last year, this year we are setting up a giant Darth Vader at Main and D.V. posters at our two branches. Each time kids return with a finished game card, they get to slap a sticker on Darth. The ultimate goal is to cover (and defeat!) this arch-villain.
To play on the superhero theme, we purchased a large and a couple of small Fathead Spiderman pix. We will cover these with post-it notes, hiding the character from the kids. Each day, staff will remove a post-it and slowly uncover our superhero!
As always, other than a few superhero posters and super hero word balloons here and there, we plan to have kids use Crayola window crayons to be our main decorators on windows during a regularly scheduled program which really brightens up the place. We'll
soft launch a few days before the public schools end to help us stretch out registration sanely.
We feel heroically ready for a great summer. How about you?
Yes, we've been as anxious as you to find out what effect our decision to stop giving out weekly prizes for summer would be. Today we shook out the preliminary stats and....
wait for it......
wait for it....
wait for it....
wait for it....
wait for it....
...no difference!!!!!!!!!!!
We had as many preschool and school-agers coming back for return visits this year when we built our robot as we did when we gave out weekly doo-dads.
Score!!!!
The team felt that with the simplified program we had more time for interactions with the kids and a less stressful summer. We already have plans in mind for next year to help increase interest in the donation part of the program (three caped superheroes representing three different charities for kids to choose to put their sticker on).
It's good to see these results and put the final cap on a busy summer and great to know our adventure was successful. Onward!
You can read about our journey
here,
here and
here!
We are within ten days of the end of our SLP. We'll figure out final numbers and the upshot in August.
For now, we can say that we have stayed busy and lots of return-adventurers have come back to help us build our robot with their stickers. The excitement of the gamecard design and stickers seems great for the kids and we have YET to hear kids or parents bemoan no weekly doo-dads. While we also included a charity component (our Friends will donate money to the Human Society, Eco Park and Children's Museum based on the kids reading), this has not seemed as motivational as the very visual robot slowly building.
We dreamed the robot like this in this first mini-model. Staff had a little trepidation on how it would all work. We used quarter sheets of paper that kids could sticker as they went along. This is how our robot has been growing:
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| Early June |
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| Early July |
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| Late July |
Kids have loved watching the robot get bigger and bigger. Staff has loved NOT dealing with weekly doo-dads. Has the fact that we aren't offering weekly prizes but only the book at the end affected overall return visits to the library? We may be surprised (unpleasantly or pleasantly). Stay tuned for final results next month when we shake out the numbers from our database!
To read about our journey, please stop
here,
here and
here!
But that begs the question - where does the money come from? After all, books are our priciest prize.
One thing we did to find the money was change how we program.
We booked performers for years - singers, magicians, storytellers, performers of one kind and another. A very few could generate a crowd of 100-150 kids in our auditorium. Most would result in crowds of 25-45 kids and adults - and this in a city of 51,000 population!
The costs involved with performers were substantial - $200 if we were lucky; $300-$500 and up more likely. Add mileage, hotel and expenses and ouch! When we had 25 people in the audience, it meant we were paying anywhere from $10-30 per person in attendance for the program. That didn't seem like a sustainable use of money.
We were also developing some amazing in-house programs led by staff. It occurred to us that if we continued this strong staff programming and cut back on performers, we would have enough money to fund the hundreds of books that we want to give to kids as prizes.
So we made it so. We still book a performer or two for special events. The money we saved went directly to buying books as prizes for babies through teens. Parents and kids both love these books. Kids get to choose freely from a variety that we put out. We fill our program room for two weeks in August with books for kids to choose from who have completed their SLP in previous weeks.
Of course, we could also have written grants, looked for donors or sought money in other ways. But we chose to enfold books into existing programming money. By changing our priorities we made sure we could make a book in the hand of a child happen. Seems worth it!
(For more thoughts on sustainability and funding in Youth Services, see
this series starting here that I wrote last fall).
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
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Our robot is coming together -yellow is body,
red is arms; blue-legs; orange-neck, feet, hands. |
We are just completing our third week (of nine) in the SLP. As I mentioned in our
original post on going prizeless for the school age kids, we've been thinking about this for awhile. This year we took the leap.
So how is it going? We have had over 300 return visits to check in and get new game cards. Rather than weekly doo-dads, each time they return, kids get a sticker or two to help us build our robot - and money is donated to kid-friendly community organizations for the stickers as well.
We haven't heard a peep about "Where are the prizes?" or "Don't we get something besides a sticker?"
We had a hunch that this would be the case. We use stickers for
1000 Books and
Baby Book Bees at each level. We also have stickers during each year's
Smart Cookie Club that we offer to kids. And our
Lego Check-out Club let's kids add lego bricks to a collaborative lego sculpture. So a significant number of kids expect and enjoy the concept of "building" or "making" something bigger with their contributions.
Kids are very excited about completing four game cards to receive a book. That is a goal that really motivates. And Sara's adaptions for the game cards (based on our transliteracy design from previous years) have made the program for school age kids fun and worthwhile. Reading and literacy activities have morphed from extrinsic to intrinsic rewards.
Sometimes our fear of what "might" happen keeps us from embracing change that moves us ahead. We'll keep you posted at the blog on how we do as we go further into the summer.
So far, so good!
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| Robot sample |
Oh.my.gosh. We're doing it!!!! We are not giving weekly prizes during summer reading program this year! Woooo-hooooo!
For those of you following the blog, you may remember that I
stood on the precipice two years ago considering prizes or no prizes for our school age SLP component. My colleague Sara (who, while she blogs over at
Bryce Don't Play, is also just a room away from me IRL) was encouraging last year, but I didn't have the time or the will to get the team together to solve the problems/design a weekly-prizeless summer.
But this year we were ready when planning time came around. We decided to do a three-pronged change-over.
First we morphed our bookmarks into game cards. As always, our summer program is not just about reading but about kids writing, using the library and engaging with the world around them.
The new card is below at the end of the postEach time the kids finish a card - any five squares, they get a sticker to put on our robot. All squares filled in = 2 stickers.
And those stickers help us keep track! Kids will be participating to raise money for a local charity/child-friendly organization. We have three locations so the Humane Society, Children's Museum and local Eco-Park will receive the money raised. We think kids will love the thought of their reading helping out a worthy cause.
Next, each time kids return with their game card filled in, they will get a sticker that they will add to build our giant robot. We are using the CSLP Fizz Boom Read theme and clearly, we MUST build a robot.
The robot's head will be high out of reach and kids will fill in blocks with their stickers to gradually build the robot.
This picture above is a pathetic attempt to illustrate the concept of how the robot will grow through the use of my mini-robot. There will be a foot piece, an arm piece and a torso piece at the beginning. As each piece fills with stickers, we will add more pieces to build the robot. We hope to motivate the kids to rock out their reading and activities to build the robot BIG!
Like every year, kids who return to the library with at least four completed game cards receive a free a book to keep. We are always thrilled to offer kids a book.
And we staffers will be reading hard too! Plans are afoot to track our reading so kids can see how their librarians are doing.
We are truly excited to take this no-prize step and look forward to navigating the reactions from the kids and parents....stay tuned!
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Slick new card designed by the team!
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In a recent blog post in
School Matters, Stephan Krashen goes back to one of his themes - rewarding kids for reading. He questions public libraries offering rewards during their summer reading programs.
"Research consistently shows that rewarding people for activities that are inherently pleasurable can result in less interest in doing the activity. Rewards send the message that the activity is not pleasurable and nobody would do it without a bribe."That paragraph knocked me on my heels. It is not new news for me. I am familiar with Krashen's work and philosophy. But this time he wrote about it in a way that echoed an observation made by my co-worker, Sara Bryce, when we were
struggling with our boat issues:
"Why are we rewarding kids for expected behavior?" Why indeed?
I have never minded rewarding kids for reading - kind of based on my own feeling that I really enjoy my twice-monthly reward for working - my paycheck! We give a fair amount of doo-dads to the kids but also make sure they can earn a book as an ultimate reward. But I also appreciate and admire folks who have made the break with prizes...just couldn't quite see my own way through to it.
This week, we are giving kids one of the primo SLP gifts - a plastic book bag. This was, with the exception of the book prize, our most expensive purchase (think bookmarks, stickers and tattoos as the usual prize in our arsenal). Kids have been slightly blase. And one of the parents expressed surprise that we were giving out a prize so quickly. In other stealth or passive programs we do (
1000 Books Before Kindergarten;
Reading is Key Club;
Cookie Club), there are very few prizes despite many return visits and check-ins. And here we are... giving out weekly loot.
And, most troubling of all to me, it isn't like more or better prizes are bringing greater numbers of kids into our summer reading program. Numbers of participating kids are continuing at about the same rate as they have in the previous three years I've been doing SLP here.
It also occurred to me that, in our summer Rubber Ducky Club for kids birth through three, we give the kids just two incentives: a rubber ducky and a book. In our summer teen program, we give the kids just two incentives: a USB drive and a book. What is so different for the age 4-10 years old program that we think we need to give out so much loot? As a co-worker pointed out to me, we are still thinking in the same manner we did when we ran the program much differently and traditionally. We have broken new ground with our stealth programs and with redesigning and re-imagining our SLP for elementary-aged kids. Now we need to complete the evolution.
Fear of change is a powerful de-motivator. Despite being a change agent in bringing in and/or welcoming new initiatives and ways to give great service, even I have my balking-at-the-precipice moments. But, on the no-prize/low-prize front, I think I may be almost ready to leap.
17 Comments on Summer Reading Prizes ...Or Not!, last added: 6/15/2012
I am gently weaning my patrons away from the "we must be rewarded for every single bit of reading" model. We're starting with the bookmark idea which I borrowed from you (-:) and this first week the kids and parents are adjusting to the idea of just one prize each week!
For our summer program, we have kids set their own goals (the number of books or pages they hope to read over the 8 weeks of the program). They get prizes twice: once when they're halfway to goal, and once when they hit goal. This structure works well for us!
We have greatly weaned this year. We went from four-five prizes per level where multiple levels could be earned per week to just a single prize per week. (Pencil, tattoo, bubbles, coupon book, book of their choice.) It has been fine! I haven't heard any complaints from parents, and while we have had a few kids whine -- it hasn't been a repeated affair.
And I'm also doing the bookmark log that you posted about, with SO MUCH SUCCESS. I think everyone appreciates the program being streamlined.
A few years ago we switched from a daily reading log with 6 weeks of weekly small prizes (tattoos, stickers, plastic choking hazards, etc) and a book at the end to one prize (squirt gun, jar of bubbles) and a book, both given out when kids reach the goal. We hand out coupons at sign up, at goal, and at programs during the summer. I feel much better about this structure than I did the weekly little stuff. (The teens get a book and candy.) I LOVE giving out the books and I don't mind a little something extra just for fun, but I don't think our prizes are bringing in new families or really encouraging non-readers (though I could be wrong). I do think they are a fun thank-you to our regular patrons...maybe that's how we could be framing SRP prizes, as thanks instead of rewards for reading. I love Amanda's plan of having kids set their own goals! Thanks for writing this post!
I often wonder about this too. All of the reward systems in place for reading, and really the ones who keep coming back continuously are the ones who would have done it without any kind of rewards.
Good post. I always enjoy reading about the advantages/disadvantages of prizes/toys/books/nothing. When I first started at my current library, kids got a fairly good prize (squirt gun caliber) as often as every week, with a book bag and several prizes at the end--no books involved. Every year I've tweaked it a bit. It's still an evolving process, but right now instead of earning a prize each week, they earn two virtual tickets, which they can then redeem for a small prize or save up for a bigger prize. Although we've thrown in leftover prizes from previous years, we're really emphasizing books this year. Most of the large prizes are books.
The only prizes I remember getting and keeping were books. Everything else ended up in the trash can, it seems. Something I remember doing as a child in a summer program was getting a star with my picture on it (oh the lack of privacy!). The star was hung up in the library and every time we came or read x number of books or whatever, I got to add a sticker to the star. There were a lot of stickers on my star.We probably got to take the home at the end, I don't remember.
Good luck with weaning off prizes!
Yes, fewer doo-dads and more power to the kids!
I'm glad to hear the bookmark format is working for you. And I think streamlining prizes makes a huge difference too!
Let me know how the bookmark transition goes for your kiddos. I think if we can keep making it fun and less rewards based, we will all be fine!
Mel, exactly - a thank you present for coming into and using the library. I love that thought. All these comments are making me even braver!
Hosta Nerd (Jen is that you?),I agree - the kids who would read no matter what are unmoved by rewards and those who don't like reading pretty much don't like our doo-dads either ;->.
And anonymous - I love the idea of of virtual tickets (so much more exciting than the real world kind!)
In these times of budget cuts and no money, it seems almost wasteful to me to hand out as many little trinkets as we do for summer reading. And the prizes seem to mean much more to the parents than to the kids. That is why we continue to do incentives, I think, out of sheer dread of the parents' reactions if we were to not give out prizes. I do like that the kids earn a book after reading 15 hours, but the trinkets? I wish I didn't have to give those out.
When I first started at my library kids got increasingly larger prizes for each level - with prize drawings at the end. I was told that there used to be "really good/exciting" drawing prizes, like a bike, radio, etc. What I was able to dredge up clearly did not come up to standard! I've been whittling it down year by year - the first to go was the drawings and then increasing magnificence by levels. I would like to do some kind of a super reader club at some point, where kids can read for charity, but I think we'll always have to have some little prizes as it's something the kids look forward to all year. I do avoid the really junky stuff as much as possible and try to buy little things the kids can DO something with - paintable wooden shapes, bouncy ball, etc.
I still give out reading rewards and they vary based on what I have in my wallet and what I see on the dollar row or snack row--they get stickers, or bouncy balls, or juice pouches, or cookies, or chips. No books. Why--because the parents got frustrated by the volume of books and the staff got frustrated trying to keep them in some semblance of order. So we read for fun and every 25 books you get a brown paper bag. If you like what is in it--terrific! If you don't then read some more and try again.
We also issue a challenge (as a group, read so many books and I'll do something to my hair)--the last two years I have put my hair up in a faux hawk and this past year liberty spikes (top readers got to spray the spikes with temporary color). My daughter with the waist length hair has offered to stand her hair up as a reward for a group reading challenge. Since this is week two and the group has already read 734 books, I'm thinking a goal of 2500 is not unreasonable. At the end of the season we have a party with ice cream and recognize those that read and celebrate the group total.
Great post, Marge. I suggest: less focus on transaction, more on interaction!
I am so with you. It's what we truly say and do as we chat with the kids and lead them to books that is the fundamental magic of our work!