The Pilot Point Community Library gave residents a sweet end to the summer.
The library hosted an End of Summer Ice Cream Party on July 31, giving attendees the chance to pie library staff in celebration of the community meeting the summer reading program goals.
“The community read a total of 222,472 minutes, surpassing our original community goal of 120,000 minutes,” Pilot Point’s Library Director Jenna Glass shared in an email.
From June to July, readers across the community had the chance to participate in the summer reading program by contributing to the community reading goal and personal reading goals.
Pilot Point’s library participated in this year’s national theme, 'Unearth a Story,' through the Collaborative Summer Library Program.
Glass shared earlier this summer that the focus would be on dinosaurs and paleontology, which proved to be a big hit.
“We've heard so many parents say how excited their kids are about all the dinosaurs in the library,” Glass said.
There were 181 active participants in the summer reading challenges.
Glass shared that 116 of them completed the personal challenge of reading 600 minutes or 20 books for ages 5 and younger.
“So, not only did the community go way over our community goal in terms of minutes, we also almost doubled our active participant numbers from last year,” Glass said.
Over the summer, the library gave away 101 books for free as prizes.
Glass thanked “Friends of the Pilot Point Community Library and Lake Ray Roberts Rotary Club for donating to our program,” in an
email.
The summer reading challenge had varying age participation. In previous years, the program was only offered to ages 3 and up, but this year the challenge was open to anyone, starting at age zero.
“Everyone could participate, and we got good turnout for them, too, even though they're just babies,” Glass said. “It's really encouraging the caregivers to read to babies and start that early literacy.”
One of the library’s biggest additions to the summer reading program this year was offering Beanstack; it’s both an app and a website that is designed to track the number of hours read.
“Offering it online in general just allowed us to reach a lot more people and allow more people to keep up with it, [who] maybe can't come in physically to the library very often,” Glass said.
Glass added that, since the app has been well received by the community and more people are becoming accustomed to it, the library plans to continue using it and potentially add different reading challenges throughout the year.
“I've learned that our community is very receptive to change in a lot of ways,” Glass said. “They're very happy with the changes we've made here during the summer, but just in general, too.”
There were over 60 attendees at the party, which featured a sundae bar with syrups and a variety of ice cream toppings, as well as coloring material and other activities.
“ A lot of the kids that were there by this point had … gotten to know us,” Glass said. “They're really proud of their own reading, and they're excited to celebrate with ice cream.”
An even sweeter treat for attendees was the opportunity to pie several library staff members with whipped cream, including police officer Nathan Imlay, who Glass said he and another officer happened to show up and, in the spur of the moment, Imlay decided he was willing to get pied.
“I'm really proud of my staff for the great program they helped put on, and I'm really proud of the community for all the participation, the reading and just the incredible effort they put in this summer,” Glass said. “It was really awesome.”
