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<\/a>Astronaut Clayton Anderson talks to a rapt audience.<\/p><\/div>
\nI imagine it\u2019s a different cycle for stores in resort communities, but for us the bulk of our kids events programming tends to correlate to the school year\u2014whether that\u2019s school events, book festivals put on in partnership with librarians, or bookfairs. Even our in-store author events calendar calms down a little bit for kids, as attention turns to stocking up on books for summer camp and vacations. Even though summer is always a shorter season than it seems, I find that this slower programming season offers an opportunity to\u00a0step back and make sure that we follow through\u00a0on all the\u00a0things we\u2019ve started along the way.
\nWhile it\u2019s scaled back, our public author event schedule for kids isn\u2019t totally on hiatus. Yesterday, we were lucky enough to host astronaut Clayton Anderson for more than 100 budding explorers\u2014helping us test our new 4PM picture book event slot for the second time since we piloted it<\/a>, and supporting the idea that this\u00a0slightly earlier\u00a0time just might be the solution to\u00a0getting families through our area’s after work traffic crunch.\u00a0It was an awesome, space-tastic event that let out in time for everyone to get home to dinner. <\/a>I even picked up my own kids from camp early to join the fun. Although as this photo of my little astronauts proves,\u00a0any well-planned event photo op is only as good as its participants!
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\nIn other programming progress, this year also saw our first full school year operating our growing bookfair program out of a stand-alone warehouse. On Tuesday Ellen Greene, our Bookfair Manager, and I mapped out\u00a0a summer schedule for\u00a0title curation and staff expansion plans. Ellen walked me through some incredible work she’s done to redesign our Excel tracking sheets with pivot tables, which is honestly pretty game-changing in terms of sorting all the data we look at. (Any other Excel nerds out there nodding along?)
\nWe recently hired a new round of booksellers for the summer, which offered a perfect chance to\u00a0implement the\u00a0new 201 Kids and Gift Department training idea<\/a>\u00a0I wrote about in February. After actually trying it (because you never really know), I think it\u2019s a useful format for giving non-specialists a few more tools to start with and we’re going to keep going with it. I\u2019ll have to see over time what information proves most valuable here, but for this one I highlighted some key books to know and introduced some tools for answering common questions, including:
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