PITTSTON —As the Pittston Memorial Library’s Children and Youth Services Coordinator, Kristen Boettger has seen plenty of children come and go.
The children often don’t stay gone very long as some return as teenagers to work with Teen Services Coordinator Noelle Kozak.
Both Kozak and Boettger are hoping to eliminate that trend of children coming and going with their new Page Turners Club.
“We are looking to reach a demographic here at the library that sometimes gets forgotten,” said Kozak. “We have our children’s programs that get preschoolers, but as they start to enter school age, they sometimes get involved with stuff at school and taper off.”
The Page Turners Club is for children ages 9 to 11 and is run by both library coordinators.
Boettger said it’s a good way for children to get to know Kozak before they get too old for children’s programs.
“That’s why we wanted to do it together, to show the bridging from going from the children’s section to the teens and they would get to know Noelle better,” she said.
Participants in the Page Turners Club read a novel and then discuss it with the coordinators before having a snack and doing a craft related to the book.
The club, which started in October, meets the second Thursday of other month which gives the club members plenty of time to read the book.
The next meeting is Feb. 9.
“We were thinking that with their school work they wouldn’t have maybe as much time to read,” said Boettger. “We wanted to give them more of a chance to complete the book. We don’t want them to think of it as homework; we just want to do it for fun.”
The club recently finished reading “A Shiloh Christmas”and the craft was making a melted snowman ornament.
“We wanted to come up with a dog ornament, but we couldn’t come up with anything,” Boettger said with a laugh. “We decided to just do the melted snowman ornament. We’re filling in a glass ornament with salt to be the snow and then little black foam circles to be the eyes and buttons and a carrot nose.”
The next novel on the list “Tuck Everlasting” and Kozak noted the only criteria for the novels participants choose is that they are fiction.
“We’re looking more for what’s fun,” said Kozak. “Not a brain scratcher, necessarily.”
The library provides copies of the novels for the participants to borrow.
Because the Page Turners Club is still fairly new, Kozak and Boettger are always looking for new members to join and are getting the word out through social media and word of mouth
Boettger said she’s also going to get in touch with local elementary schools to help spread the word.
The coordinators are hoping the Page Turners Club will help keep children involved with the library.
“They’ll want to come into the library and stay longer,” said Kozak. “Like I said before, once they reach that school age and get involved with other activities, they forget about us for a couple of years. We’re hoping this program, and our other programs, will help us keep them will into high school.”
