What is summer going to be like at your library? There have been several posts and discussions on the ya-yaac listserv recently about how to do “summer reading” for teens this year. Are you encouraging teens to read and log their hours, minutes, books? Are you planning fabulous programs and hoping that as teens attend these events, they will also check out books? Are you just going to focus on programming and not worry about the reading component? What is your plan?

If you are participating in the Collaborative Summer Library Program, the theme this year is Metamorphosis @ Your Library. This is a great theme that reflects how the teen years are years of massive change.

At Wake County Libraries, we are hoping to have success through a different approach. Our Summer Reading Club Committee has come up with a program called 30 Challenges: Challenge Yourself and Change Your Life. In this program, we are putting 30 challenges on our teen library blog. Teens can choose to complete one, several, or all of these challenges. They will have all summer to complete as many as they like. What type of challenges? One challenges asks teens to find a new use for plastic grocery bags and describe it. Another asks teens to listen to music from another country. They should tell us what country the music was from and describe the music. Each challenge they complete gives them an entry in our drawing for fantastic prizes, such as lunch with an author or a private tour of a museum.

The idea for this program came together from the minds of several different people, but I think one librarian in particular remembered a book she enjoyed either late in high school or early in college that contained a list of different things you were supposed to do before you die. She remembered discovering all sorts of new things by going through this book. This program is our attempt to give teens that same experience.

What I like about this program is that it allows teens to work at their own pace. It also lets them decide how much effort they want to put into this program. And the challenges will give them real-life experiences I think they will remember. And who knows, they might have to pick up some books or look at some websites (or both) to complete the challenges! Presto change-o, summer reading without those annoying reading logs.