Teen Read Week (TRW) is bearing down upon us, Oct 15-21, and I thought it might be a good time to start talking about it. This year’s theme is “Get Active @ Your Library.” This week is a great time to let the young adults in your community know that the library can be a fun place and better yet, that reading can be fun. It is also a time for the young adult services to step to the forefront of your library and show the rest of the community what you do.

So, what do I do for TRW? This is the question that many librarians ask themselves when they first start thinking about TRW. What I am proposing is that we use this blog as a place to share our ideas for TRW this year. I will explain what I plan on doing for TRW but it would be nice to hear what everyone else is doing as well. So, if you email me (jberns89@gmail.com) with a short description of what you are doing for TRW, programs, school visits, contests, etc… I will post them on the blog. For those of you out there having librarians block you can simply look to this blog over the next week or two for some good ideas.

I guess I will get us started. This year another librarian and I are making a school visit and hosting a fun program. We will be visiting the local high school and talking to the all of the freshman classes about the library. We plan to encourage them to get library cards and to tell them about all our library has to offer, from databases to video games, or books to movies. Of course, because this week is about teen reading we will be doing some booktalks. We plan on booktalking a few books from Yalsa’s 2006 Top 10 Best Books list including Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways Vol. 1: Pride and Joy and John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Finally we will give them all a coupon they can bring to the library to receive a free book. Free books will most likely include the above mentioned books as well as some other well known titles like Uglies, Airborn, and a few others.

In addition to the school visit we will be hosting an event at the library to tie in with the theme, “Get Active @ Your Library”. We will be hosting a video game night with the game Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix. Dance Dance Revolution games are very physical experiences and the thought is that this would be a very fun and attractive way to “get active”. Not to mention, showing some adults that gaming can be a social and active experience is always a good thing.

So there are two ideas for all of you, now its your turn to let me know what you are doing. Email me at jberns89@gmail.com with a paragraph or two about what you are doing and I will try and post a few ideas every couple of days as I get them.  If you want me to post your email or other info about you so people can contact you with questions about the programs let me know.  I will try to post a first name and library for each person if it is given to me.