NEWS RELEASE
ORILLIA PUBLIC LIBRARY
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The Orillia Public Library’s reading club attracted 772 members this year.
Interaction and engagement with our club members skyrocketed. We spent more than 159 hours listening to individual book reports – a total of four full-time-work weeks. The children’s club increased its engagement by 10%, and the teens increased by 11% this summer.
The tree in the front window of the library has a leaf for every report from the TD Summer Reading Club kids, and it is in full leaf!
Our club is free and open to all children and teens. The kids commit to a reading goal and check in with verbal book reports throughout the summer, earning prizes and talking about next reads with the staff. Children who set a goal, and completed it, were awarded “Library Super Reader” lawn signs.
We are thankful to the Orillia Lions Club and the Rotary Club of Orillia for generous donations to support our club incentives – weekly prizes, ballot draws, and outreach events. Domino’s Pizza supplied our wrap parties with free pizza.
Our team created a free Storywalk event to bring to local parks, including the Leacock Museum, Tudhope Park, Couchiching Beach Park, and Scout Valley. We met with hundreds of book lovers and went for a one-kilometre hike through local trails to read a book together, displayed page-by-page on signs along the way. We saw participation from schools in Orillia, Severn, Oro-Medonte and Ramara townships, as well as summer visiting members from Barrie, Kitchener, Ottawa and Calgary.
The top Orillia school was Monsignor Lee, followed closely by Orchard Park.
Congratulations to everyone.
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