ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Summer vacation is under way in communities across the area, and with children out of school for a couple months, parents are looking for fun things for their kids to do.
In the town of Plains, they need look no further than the library for some fun, as the summer reading program will soon be taking place at Plains Community Library.
Activities are scheduled to kick off this week, and PCL Director Celia Stauch said she is excited about this year’s program’s theme, “Color Our World.”
“It gives us the ability to have a lot of diversity in the programs we do and the books we have and the activities we play with the kids,” she said.
Mad Science was scheduled to be at the Plains library from 1 to 2 p.m. today, with summer reading favorite Dan Dan the Magic Man scheduled to perform Monday from 1 to 2 p.m.
Stauch, however, is particularly excited about a group coming from Kansas City called Drum Life coming to PCL Wednesday, June 25, from 10 to 11 a.m.
“They come out with 30 to 45 drums, and it’ll allow everybody who comes to this program to have a musical instrument,” she said. “Someone will lead us making music with his drum. I’m really excited about this one. We’ve never had this person come out. That’ll be a great program for all ages.”
Stauch said PCL struggles to get more programs for all ages, and with limited summer activities in Plains, summer reading plays a vital role in the community.
“It is definitely one of the more important activities aside from sports,” she said. “In a community our size, there’s not a lot that goes on during the day.”
Stauch too said she is looking to have activities every day for children coming into the library to do.
“There’s no set time. They just come in and do the activities,” she said. “They’re free to read. We have our 3D printers out, 3D pins.”
Small in size, Plains is likewise cut off from bigger communities such as Liberal, Garden City and Dodge City, and with little to do, this makes it difficult to keep children active and engaged.
“That’s the most important part – keeping our kids in the community engaged throughout the summer so we don’t have that gap between summer and school again,” Stauch said.
The PCL director said the daily activities at the library will include something as simple as a small craft for children.
“Every day, they’ll be able to come in, and there’s going to be something new at the library for them to do,” she said. “The big thing we’re striving for this year is to keep kids engaged and continue to give them something to do. We don’t have a movie theater. We don’t have an arcade. The library is pretty essential to our community.”
Stauch said except for the city’s swimming pool, summer sports and the library, options are definitely limited for fun in Plains.
“Hopefully, the pool gets to open and stays open,” she said. “That’s our hope to help supplement those activities.”
Education-wise, Stauch said getting children involved in summer reading is very important, particularly for those in grades kindergarten through fifth.
“Summer never sounds very long for adults, and a few months flies by, but on an educational and literary basis, the gap, the space between the end of the school year and the beginning of the next school year, if kids aren’t coming in and reading and doing these exercises on their own, you definitely will see a big fall back on where they were at with the end of one year compared to the next year,” she said. “Then they’re playing catch-up, but we know if you come in and you read and you partake in our STEM program, that’ll definitely keep them engaged, keep their brain working, keep up their literary skills. That’s so important for them to not have that fall back from the summer.”
Stauch said for some kids, summer reading boosts reading skills for their next year of school.
“They’ll be just as well versed in their reading, if not more so than when they left for the summer,” she said. “Our big push is making sure they’re coming in to read, coming in to do our STEM program. We want them to continue to excel in reading and STEM and all those other things. We don’t ever want to see them fall back.”
Stauch said PCL has some other exciting events coming up this year.
“We just launched Beanstack, which is a Web-based program where you can check the books you read, log the amount of hours you read, earn badges, do challenges, play bingo with books, earn prizes through the library,” she said. “Beanstack is super awesome, and it’s open to our entire community.”
Beanstack is funded by the Meade County Community Foundation, and Stauch said a big “thank you” to that organizations. She added Beanstack has also gotten many sign-ups.
“We’ve got a community goal of 200 books by December, and we’re already about a quarter of the way there,” she said. “It’s free to everyone. They can get on our Facebook and find the link to that pretty easily.”
Sign-ups for the summer reading program have ended, and reading challenges have begun and will run throughout the entire month of June. PCL will host an end of summer reading ice cream social with free sundaes Monday, June 30, at the gazebo in Plains.
This is Stauch’s second year in charge of the PCL summer reading program, and she is very excited for what is to come for this year’s event.
“The first year was definitely trial and error, and now, I’m ready to hit the ground running for this second year and take all the things I learned from the first year and implement them now and learn from my mistakes and learn from the things that didn’t go well,” she said.
