Summer Reading Week 7: The Last Week :'(

As we dictate this blog entry to our fast-typing librarians, we have just had our tank cleaned & are happily running around in our exercise balls! What a fun way to blog!

Summer Reading Update
* Going into our last week, 948 kids have signed up for the program and written 2813 online reviews. Even though the camp season is well under way, there are still a ton of kids participating and we gerbils LOVE it! (Even more than we love running in our exercise balls.)
* We are PROUD to announce that our own Very Hungry Caterpillar has made it! He's out of the Inger Boye Room and taking on the rest of the department by storm! Great job, Book Buddies and families!
* This week we dropped off (well... not we. Our staff.) the first batch of donated food to the Moraine Township Food Pantry. Since we gerbils are so food-oriented, we thought we'd share a list: 9 boxes of pasta, 3 big chocolate bars, 1 box of cereal, 2 boxes of cookie mix, 1 jar of peanut butter, 1 box of energy bars, 1 bottle of BBQ sauce, 1 can of chili, 1 box of tea, 3 cans of soup, 1 can or ravioli, 5 lbs of rice, 3 bags of dried beans, and 10 packages of bread mix. We're glad that the Food Pantry now has all this food... but we would have liked just one spoonful of peanut butter before it was donated. We just can't help it.

Summer Reader of the Week
* Congratulations to this week's Summer Readers of the Week!
* This week's preschool winner is 3 year-old Meadow R. This week, Meadow has enjoyed reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (how perfect!), A Good Day by Kevin Henkes, and Oh No, George! by Chris Haughton.
* This week's K-5 winner is Brayden R., another voracious reader going in to second grade this fall. Recently, he enjoyed reading Big Nate Strikes Again by Lincoln Peirce, Goosebumps #45: Ghost Camp by R.L. Stine, and The Lemonade Crime by Jacqueline Davies.
* Great job to all the Summer Readers.

At the Library
* The last sessions of Stories Under the Stars (7/23) and Outdoor Drop-In Chess (7/28) are this week.
* Check out photos from last week's performance of The Magic Onion on our Facebook page.
* It's supposed to cool down a little bit this week, but you can always keep cool and green by filling up your water bottle at the library's new drinking fountain when you visit. Thats where us gerbils fill up ours!

Literary Links
* Last week the children's book world lost two significant authors. Else Homelund Minarik, author of the Little Bear series and No Fighting, No Biting, among others, passed away at the age of 91. Donald J. Sobol, award-winning author of the popular Encyclopedia Brown series, passed away at the age of 87.
* Popular author Lev Grossman writes about the effect of reading picture books to children on the readers in a wonderful, parents'-eye view article in Time: Hating Ms. Maisy: The Joy, Sorrow, and Neurotic Rage of Reading to Your Children.

ALSC & LEGO/DUPLO Read! Build! Play! Project

LEGO/DUPLO and the Association for Library Service to Children have joined hands to celebrate and support local libraries. The most nominated library in the Read! Build! Play! Project (vote here) will receive $5,000 for books and supplies. The top 200 libraries will receive a special LEGO/DUPLO Read! Build! Play! toolkit chock full of cutting edge early literacy programming that combines preschool books with a versatile collection of DUPLO bricks. You can vote once per day until October 1 & we hope you do! Share with your friends - thanks for your support!

A Reminder
* You can STILL sign up for Summer Reading! Here's another pair of links to our Summer Reading refresher presentations.