Brooklyn Public Library celebrates annual Summer Reading Program kick-off

It was a larger-than-life reminder that, if you’re taking your kids to the beach this summer, don’t forget to pack them a book, as the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza had its annual Summer Reading Program kick-off event on the morning of Thursday, June 9, encouraging students to keep on reading after school is out of session.

BPL’s Summer Reading Program encourages students to keep engaging with literature and reading over the summer by providing fun activities and challenges throughout July and August to keep up the excitement to read.

“If children don’t read while school is out of session, they will actually lose some of the progress they’ve made in the preceding school year,” said BPL Communications Director, Adam Leddy. “We want to make sure that kids are reading over the summer, and we’ve come up with a lot of fun challenges and activities to really make it fun for them to do so.”

The theme of this year’s Summer Reading Program is “get in the game” and the kick-off event certainly fit this theme by providing all kinds of games and challenges for children, such as giant chess and various puzzles.

The kick-off also had live music performances, face painting, free books from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, and even live storytelling by guest speakers like former hockey player/legend Pat Lafontaine.

If families missed this kick-off event, there’s no need to worry, because the Summer Reading Program goes on all summer long.

If you sign up, you can get recommendations every week of a book to check out or an event to go to. All you have to do is go to your local branch, talk to the librarians, and they can help you get involved, according to Leddy.

“The Summer Reading Program gives my daughter and me a way to structure our reading,” says mother Jessica Carry. “It gameifies it and gets us into a habit of thinking of a library as a community.”