Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Summer Reading Wrap Up and Reflection: Teen Edition

Our teen summer reading game is geared towards teens going into 6th grade to going into 12th grade. This summer, we had 270 teens register to play the game. It is much simpler than our children's game!

How We Did It:

After they sign up, the teens receive a calendar of the summer reading dates (in this case, June 10th to August 3rd). They track the number of hours they read each day. For every 5 hours they read, they get a scratch-off ticket. It could say one of the following things:


  • You win a book - We have a cart of prize books from donations and such that we use for prizes over the summer. I also use a lot of the ARCs and swag I pick up at ALA Annual!
  • You win a prize - We have a box with some fun instant prize-y type things like mini-notebooks, leftover comics from Free Comic Book Day, lip gloss, etc.
  • You win an entry in our Grand Prize Drawing - Teens fill out the back of the scratch-off and place it in our entry box. This year we gave away 2 Kindle Fires!
  • Pick another ticket - 'Nuff said
  • Sorry try again - 'Nuff said
We print our scratch-off tickets in-house. We print them on cardstock and then buy rolls of the silver scratch-off dot stickers. It works pretty well because we can always make more when we run low. 

The first library I worked in also used scratch-off tickets with their teen summer reading game and it was also a huge hit! 


We also did a range of great programs for teens:

For details on any of these programs, feel free to contact me!

How Did It Go?:

I feel like our teen summer reading game is pretty streamlined and easy to do. Our teens seem to like participating and enjoy the scratch-off element a lot. I think we offered a great variety of programs and our attendance was great overall at every program. The one "failure" we ran into though was in trying to do a Reader's Theatre program. We had 8 teens sign up and only 5 half-committed to the program. The problem is that over the summer our teens are very busy with camps and other activities. Plus, we already have 2 other youth theatre groups in the community. So I guess we'll just chalk it up to experience, right?

How was your teen summer reading game? What kinds of things did you do for teens this summer?

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