New London Library programming continues to grow

NEW LONDON — Like many local libraries, HJ Nugen Library in New London kicks off their summer programming as students venturing into summer vacation.

According to Assistant Library Director Brittney Lerner, over the last couple of years, she has seen exponential growth in participation and community support of summer programming.

“It has grown a lot in the last five years,” Lerner said.

While HJ Nugen Library has offered a summer reading program for many years, Lerner stated that a real shift began in the program when she led a campaign asking for community involvement.

According to Lerner, previously, the library used to offer small trinket-type prizes for participants and then other prizes for the top few readers.

“I decided that I was going to go out and start asking people for donations,” she said.

So, Lerner put in many hours of her free time asking businesses to partner with the library.

“I kind of just created a monster because we didn't used to do this,” she said with a laugh. “It’s kind of grown into the whole thing. We have really great community, and we have a lot of businesses in Mt. Pleasant, as well, that contribute to that.”

Thanks to these donations, every reader participating in the program now receives prizes they are excited about.

These donations also make it possible for the program to consistently offer a summer kickoff party following the last day of school. This year’s included walking tacos.

With greater incentives, Lerner has seen growth in reading program participation.

“I would say we probably have about we had about half as many turning in logs at that time,” Lerner said.

Using logs created by Library Director Taelor Donnolly, participants in the program keep track of their reading via pages or minutes and submit them to the library for the opportunity to win these donated prizes.

“We have sets of brag tags that people can collect from turning in their logs,” Lerner said. “We only ordered 175 of each this year because obviously not all the adults take them, but we only ordered 150 last year, and we ran out of some of them.”

Summer reading logs are due back to the library by 2 p.m. July 22.

HJ Nugen’s summer programming includes more than the reading program with prizes.

As a team, Donnolly, Lerner, and Library Assistant Kim May, work together each year to brainstorm ideas for activities to include in the summer library program, too.

According to Lerner, the team receives a theme from the Iowa Library Association, this year’s revolves around the idea of “Find Your Voice.”

The programming consists of paid entertainment found out the fall library showcase, local partnerships, and activities ran by each of the women of the library.

Starting out in June, much of the programming remains on Wednesdays when local children already expect to come to the library for their early out children’s programming.

“This year we decided to go with Wednesdays because that's normally when our after-school program would run during the year,” Lerner said. “So, we just decided to keep with Wednesdays, and we thought that would be easier for them to remember.”

Lerner said that consideration for summer baseball schedules also helped influence their scheduling decisions.

Some of the summer activities will include creating tiny art and displaying it in an art show, a doughnut themed day, a jumping spider story hour, a foam blaster party, music activities, and a puppet show.

While much of the programming focuses on the kids, they do offer some family and teen activities, as well.

“As we head into July, there's a lot more of the programming that is in the afternoon and evening so that more families can attend,” she said.

“We do have a family fun night that's on a Saturday,” Lerner said. “We're doing karaoke. We'll have a bleach shirt station, like we did again last year. And they just have to bring a dark colored shirt or whatever they want to die. I mean, some people will bring blankets. Some people will bring sweatshirts, T-shirts, pants. We have a bunch of different designs, and they spray it with bleach. And the bleach brings out the design.”

Throughout the summer, Lerner creates various escape room activities for the teen programming, too.

“We usually do stuff like movies, and we do games,” she said. “We'll play video games or board games … A lot of times we'll have like, if we're doing a movie, we'll put an escape room with it.”

HJ Nugen Library staff keep an updated activities calendar on at their website: www.newlondon.lib.ia.us and post most activities as events via their Facebook page.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com