Last summer, I piloted “My First Book Club,” a program for rising kindergarten and first grade students and their grown-ups. It was successful at first, but attendance dropped off after the fall – partly, I think, because I had to alternate between the more popular Saturday morning time and Friday afternoons, which didn’t work as well for everyone. (If we had another Children’s Librarian who could also offer weekend programs…)

I decided our February book club would be the last one until summer, when I would run it again for a new group of rising K/1st graders. No one showed up for the program…but, there were plenty of kids and adults in the children’s room, so I invited them all in for a storytime instead. We read the same two books – Arihhonni David’s The Good Game and Who Will Win? – and used the coloring sheets I’d printed (a flying squirrel and a bat, characters in The Good Game), I just sprinkled in a few songs and rhymes as well: “Open Shut Them,” “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” and the Ella Jenkins version of “Head and Shoulders.”

So, instead of having a book club with zero attendance, I had a storytime with eleven kids and grown-ups, all of whom were pleased and grateful. With experience, it’s fairly easy to pivot from one program to a very similar one, even for a different age group – going from a music program to STEAM would be a different story – but in this case, it worked out for everyone!