Melissa Freed, a children’s librarian stooping over a grade schooler, points in answer to his question as he looks up at her extended finger. The boy walks away, satisfied, and then Freed enters a world with a castle on one side and a hot air balloon on the other.
“Our theme this summer is ‘Adventure awaits,’” Freed says as she gazes at the well-decorated walls of the children’s area of the West Lafayette Public Library. “And that can be attributed so many ways. So we’ve got the camping, packing kind of jam over there.”
She to a stuffed Snoopy the beagle and his friend Woodstock, sitting on top of a glass display case, while they wear the green, board-brimmed hats you might picture on a camp counselor.
“And then the hot air balloon. We can have a kid come in here and do a little photo shoot in the balloon. We definitely encourage reading during the summer,” she says, “and so we’ve got a whole program full of prizes, loads of community sponsors.”
At the heart of the room with the castle and balloon are shelves of books that surround a reading table designed to meet a fifth-grader at waist height, flanked by miniature plastic chairs.
Freed walks between the shelves, filled with works by Rick Riordan and Jeff Kinney as they have been for approaching two decades.
“I can’t keep them in stock, and it looks like Harry Potter’s holding his own with pretty empty gaps. I think I shelved 10 ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ this morning, but they’ll be gone.”
There are children in the room, and parents, too: A couple of fathers, one with earbuds in as his son pulls him by the hand around the low table, where more kids sit, feet dangling as child-sized hands grip hard cover volumes. A Lego event is coming up in a visible side room.
“We have good parents,” Freed says. “And that’s the thing: Some libraries are a bike ride’s distance or walking distance. This, some adult in their life brought them here.”
The library hosts events and programs throughout the summer, including some allowing kids to create their own anicorns (“not a horse, but it has a horn”) and “rocket launchers.” A community donor gifted many books, which the library uses to stock the top shelf of a rolling cart with multiple copies of finger-thick chapter books like “Clementine,” the “I Survived” series and “Owl Diaries.”
“It’s a prize for reading,” Freed says. “They get a little glider when they sign up, and when they finish they get a book and choice of backpack. We encourage kids to read, return, repeat, right? That’s the library magic. But if they read for 10 hours, they get a copy of their choice to keep. But they don’t need my prize to be motivated to read.”
“We have a huge core of regulars, which is fabulous,” she says. “We get to know them quite a bit by the end of summer. For those who walk in, we want them to feel loved and become our regulars.”
Freed says she’s long loved to read, though she protests the popular image of the librarian spending untold hours with a book – “We have to work like the rest of you,” she says – and she prefers fiction.
“It’s the trying on someone else’s shoes for a day, kind of thing. You’re in your own world, it’s an escape. I think it’s good for your mind and soul, I truly believe that.”
She says the focus for children is on summer because they have so much free time, and libraries are, of course, free as well. She says reading can help prevent the “summer slide,” which describes the common challenge kids can face when ramping back up into school in the fall after a summer spent doing things far from scholarly.
But Freed says the “real science” emphasizes how many books a child has in their home. Research suggests 80 books as a golden standard for correlation to high standardized test scores in the future. The authors of a study quoted by Scholastic say that reading as a child helps adults with using mathematical concepts in everyday situations and their communication with others.
There is a summer program at the library for adults, but Peter Goldsbrough says that for him, summer reading is “like every other type of reading.” He’s read throughout the year since retiring as a botany professor at Purdue.
He’s at the library on a Saturday afternoon to pick up a couple of books for vacation to northeast Indiana. So he can have an excuse to get away from everyone, he says with a grin.
“It’s relaxation. It’s informative,” he says. “It’s interesting. I mean, you can get lost in something.”
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