Get ready for an exciting summer at the library! Every year the Kern County Library has the Summer Reading Challenge, which consists of reading either 10 books or reading for 10 hours.

People who complete in the challenge receive prizes and can be entered into drawings for all kinds of exciting rewards! This year, with pandemic restrictions relaxing, we are preparing to go all out. The challenge starts on June 1, and we are going to have a big kick-off event at the library on June 14. Over the summer, we have performers from across the Central Valley lined-up, exciting crafts, fun events and prizes galore!

After extending our hours earlier this year and offering regular programming, we have seen a marked increase in patrons coming to the library. Our offered programs are growing more numerous, and more people are attending. We have started a new gaming group, our preschool story time and crafts have been growing, and our Teen Advisory Board is reforming. This month we are especially excited to offer short introductory classes for the 3D printers in the makerspace! We are overjoyed to be serving this community and it has been wonderful seeing both new and old faces returning after the difficulties of the last few years.

In the coming months we look forward to the Summer Reading Challenge. Summer learning loss can make the beginning of the new school year especially difficult for students and teachers. The months of educational downtime take their toll in the form of loss of reading proficiency and time spent doing catch-up in the classroom. What better way to keep kids learning over the break than by bringing them to the library for a summer of fun with intellectually stimulating activities? We hope to incentivize continued reading over the course of the summer to curb learning loss and to develop a lifelong love of reading and curiosity.

It has been a wonderful year at the Tehachapi Library thus far, and we can’t wait to see you all during the coming months!