Every Hero Has a Story

We kicked off the summer reading program at the library with an event called “Hero Day”.  We invited community heroes to come join us.  We had different stations around the library.  The police had a car seat check in the parking lot, and the fire department brought a truck for the kids to look at.  A teacher watched over the crafts and helped kids draw on the whiteboard with colored dry-erase markers.  Two nurses had a game of operation and a doctor’s kit and wore white lab coats.  The Army and Air Force had tables and gave away toys.  We had a local comic book artist do drawings with the kids.  Then we had a superhero training camp, run by teens in superhero costumes.  They challenged the kids to go through an obstacle course, including a “laser maze”, a tunnel of chairs, hopping between hula hoops and knocking down cups with a ball.  We set up the course right in the adult fiction section (which irritated my staff trying to shelve- “I’m not dodging lasers to put away books!”) We served hot dogs, lemonade and cookies.

To decorate I put up a city backdrop and a photo stand-up.  We had summer reading posters and the comic-book-like words “bam!” “Pow!”  We also put up entries from our “Who’s your hero” contest, where kids from our local school made essays and posters about their personal heroes.  We got a lot of great drawings, essays and photos.  We gave out a gift certificate for three age brackets, with a randomly drawn winner so we didn’t have to judge.  All in all, it went pretty well.