Partner with grocery stores or other critical service areas
- Leave postcards for registration with a collection box in the service area
- Completed cards are collected
- Trackers could be available at collection box or mailed out to new registrants
- Provide directions to parents including how to find books online
- Completed cards can be dropped at service areas or the library
- Completion certificates/prizes could be mailed to the home
Storytime Over the Radio
Outdoor Scavenger Hunt
Stuffed Animal Sleepover
Partner with local Animal Shelters
Invite local veterinarians to come to Storytime to show how to care for animals
Live Zoo webcams
Summer Learning Home Challenges
- Create kits available at critical service points containing projects for littles
- Summer learning challenge worksheets. Do the challenge and then teach three others like your siblings, friends, or through social media. Ideas could be baking, building, teaching a new skill, creating music.
Story walks in your community
Free Little Libraries
- These could be stocked with discards or adopted by a group in your community
- Pair it with a Free Little Pantry
Social Media Activites
- Virtual I Spy - using social media (FB, Insta, whatever) request pictures of different things each day to encourage activities and going outside! Or compose your own picture of items and release on social media!
- Reading a chapter a day of a (public domain) book. Have staff record videos at their homes
- Random acts of kindness
- Catalog/database scavenger hunts - have patrons look for information related to a specific topic using library databases
- Live Book Recommendations/Book Talks - record a short book talk, or invite patrons to post a book they enjoyed on the library’s FB page and then comment with suggested read alikes.
- COVID-19 archive - have patrons email stories, photos, or videos related to their experience of the pandemic to compile in an archive.
- Encourage journal keeping during this time.
- Video or art submissions
- Offer a pen pal matching program between staff and patrons or just between patrons.
- Invite patrons to send the library postcards and post them in the windows of the library (could ask “What do you miss about the library?” if not widely open yet, or even “I love my library because…”)
- Online reader’s advisory form using google forms and then librarians will respond with suggestions
- Sidewalk Chalk Obstacle Course