Keeping Young Readers Engaged During the Summer Months

The four booksellers on the ABC Children’s Institute education panel “Stemming the Summer Slide With Summer Reading and Book Camps” discussed how booksellers can connect with kids and their parents during summer vacation to build excitement about books and keep them reading, while bringing in more traffic during what may be traditionally slower months.

Moderated by Kelly Estep, owner of Carmichael’s Kids in Louisville, Kentucky, the June 22 panel included Amy Brabenec, children’s backlist buyer at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts; Diane Capriola, co-owner of Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia; and Melissa Fox, children’s event coordinator at Watermark Books & Café  in Wichita, Kansas.

Carmichael’s Kids, which is now two years old, never had its own summer reading program, Estep said, because the store did not want to compete with the local library program. This year, however, the store found a successful alternative in the American Booksellers Association’s Give Me Summer, Give Me Books Bingo game challenge.

Carmichael’s staff customized the Give Me Summer bingo card with the store’s logo and a few new spaces, made up their own game rules, and sent it out to 40 schools, Estep said. The school with the most kids turning in cards by the end of the summer will win a gift certificate for their library.

“If you’re like us, and you wear a lot of hats and don’t feel like you can create a whole thing from scratch, this is a really wonderful alternative,” said Estep, who noted that a robust library program “can be completely complementary” because kids can use the same books for both programs.

Little Shop of Stories’ summer reading program, which Capriola started five years ago, requires kids to record 40 hours of reading time during the summer. For each 10-hour increment, young readers can win coupons from different local businesses for treats such as free donuts or frozen yogurt. Those who make the 40 hours, said Capriola, get invited back for the store’s end of the summer party, which features pizza, ice cream, free ARCs, and games.

A couple of years ago, Little Shop of Stories also introduced a teen challenge, which requires participants to read five books and do a creative activity around one of them, such as making a playlist, casting actors in a film based on the book, or writing a letter to a character. This year, Little Shop introduced an adult version and coordinated with the local combination comic shop/bar in town to hand out free appetizers or a free beer to any adult who completes the challenge.

“We partner with a lot of local businesses and we have found that it is a great way to remind people to support local business during the summer months … and the businesses that we partner with have expressed their gratitude,” Capriola said. “It’s a great way to get people in because a parent will come in to get a free donut for the child but almost always they are buying more while they’re there. I think it’s a win-win for everybody.”

Brookline Booksmith works with approximately nine schools in the area as well as local libraries to develop its summer reading program. Each year, all the local libraries get together to create a series of recommended book lists for kids, which are divided into multiple grade categories. At the same time, each school chooses its own required titles, Brabenec said.

This means that getting ready for summer at Brookline Booksmith involves “a lot of gathering of lists and putting together displays based on the titles that are required and recommended,” said Brabenec. “We try to get the library lists as early as possible, and we try to carry as many of the titles as there are. We also try to carry all of the [schools’] required titles, if we can get them.”

All of the required titles are placed face out on the back wall with cards designating the school and grade, the author, and the title, so that “even on the off-chance we are out of a book, we will know what it is and can special order it for them,” Brabenec said. “We also keep binders with all the lists printed out, at the front desk, at info, and at the back.”

Watermark Books & Café hosts two book clubs every summer, Fox said, with hour-long meetings every two weeks running from the beginning of June through August. This year, the store created a new club for middle grade readers to go along with its club for teens, and chose Roald Dahl as its first theme.

“We had group discussions around Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. I showed them clips from the movies, and we had book-themed snacks,” Fox said. For Charlie, the store brought in different kinds of chocolates, and to pay homage to the iconic scene in Matilda, staff served chocolate cake.  

Summer camps are another way stores can bring in more business during the summer months, when times are slow. Capriola said Little Shop of Stories’ camp program, which started out as a small creative writing program in partnership with local high school students, has become hugely successful over the last 10 years. After the camp’s first year, the store developed its own program — Camp Half-Blood — based on the Percy Jackson series and inspired by BookPeople’s Camp Half-Blood in Austin, Texas.

“We basically only did Percy Jackson for a couple of years, but our reputation grew from that,” Capriola said. “Now we have 10 full weeks of summer camps.”

Each camp is a week long and is book-based in some way, she said, whether it is specially focused on a series like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter, or whether it uses books to create a unique curriculum. Little Shop’s camps, which admit 20 to 25 kids paired with three to four counselors, run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. every weekday in the store’s upstairs loft. Campers also frequently take walking field trips around the town square or to the local pool, said Capriola.

All camps cost $300, except for the store’s Magic Tree House camp and Camp Hogwarts, which bear a price tag of $350 due to higher planning costs and more demands on staff. Capriola said that when camp sign-up begins on the first Saturday in February some people start lining up at 4:30 in the morning to be there when registration opens at 9:00 a.m.

“Each year we have people ask us why they can’t register online for our camps and we tell them the reason we do it this way is that we really want to reward our loyal customers,” she said. 

At Watermark Books, last year Fox took over the operation of a smaller camp, which has been going on in some form for about five years with the help of store volunteers. Inspired by Mac Barnett and Jory John’s community-based writing program, 826 Valencia, Fox decided to reach out to the local community of artists, musicians, and writers, offering them a small remuneration (and a free lunch) to come in and teach kids about what they do for a living.

So far, an artist taught a make-your-own paper airplane class, a yoga teacher led a mindfulness and yoga class, and a local writer taught kids how to write their life stories. Fox said she will soon host a session with a local illustrator who will teach kids to draw their own comics. The camp costs $15 a session and takes place in the store’s basement area, where there are two meeting rooms. Lunch is provided from the Watermark café.

“The camps aren’t based around books, but it gets kids into the bookstore, it gets them interacting with authors, artists, and other community members, and it also gives parents something to do with their kids in the summertime,” said Fox. “It’s been a big success.”

Fox suggests that booksellers who are interested in starting their own camps start small: “It’s really the best way to do it,” she said. “Don’t think you can do five days a week from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. all summer long when you start. Even if it is just what we do, which is one day a week for two hours, it’s something to get you started and go from there.”