FYI,

Smokey the Bear Reading Challenge

The US Forest Service has offered to provide materials for a reading challenge to celebrate Smokey the Bear's 80th birthday in 2024. The challenge (and accompanying materials) will be available January - December of 2024 and will be sent to the State Library for me to distribute to libraries in late January 2024. The materials each library will get includes 1 roll of 500 Smokey stickers, 1 pack of 50 Smokey cards, and 1 Smokey stamp.

This is a great tie-in to the CSLP Summer Reading adventure theme for 2024 and the slogan “Adventure Begins At Your Library”, connecting families to outdoor activities and state/national parks. This is an optional program and you don’t have to participate, but I will still send your library the packet of information just in case. The US Forest Service has created a digital toolkit for you as well. Here’s the link: https://smokeybear.com/library-toolkit-reading-challenge

The US Forest Service is working with Beanstack and READsquared to make this challenge available electronically to all paid account holders too. I will be surveying all the libraries at the end of December 2024 to see if you participated and to ask for some basic statistics. If you have questions, just let me know.

~Sharon

All the best,