@ your library
Happy New Year! We are running another reading challenge in 2025 after having so much fun with the alphabet challenge in 2024. This year we are asking you to read 25 books that somehow meet 25 different reading prompts. Pick up the challenge at the library or keep track on your own with prompts showing up in our column and on our social media feeds every two weeks. We also encourage families to do the challenge together. Either read aloud or have different family members read different prompts or see which family member can complete the challenge first. We just want to make reading fun while providing suggestions for reading. So don’t make this too hard, have fun reading in 2025.
The first prompt for the year is to read a book about an unlikely friendship. Here are our suggestions. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, or expand your reading by trying James by Percival Everett or Big Jim and the White Boy by David Walker. Check out The Help by Kathryn Stockett, News of the World by Paulette Jiles or The Host by Stephenie Meyer. We’d love it if you are going to read as a family or include children in the challenge then take a look at Best Friends Forever! by Amy Shields or Owen and Mzee by Isabella Hatkoff.
If you have kids in many of the elementary classes or in grades 6 – 8, then remind them to read daily for the Winter Reading Program we are running with the schools. For elementary students, every child who reads at least 15 minutes a day between December 20 – February 28 (60 of those 70 days) will earn a free cookie from Sweet Living Bake shop. Middle school students are competing for a class pizza party. They tally every day they read at least 20 minutes and we calculate a percentage of reading time averaged per class with the winning class getting a pizza party. Stop by and let us help find material for your student to read.
The New Year can also be a time to explore new skills and learn new things. The library has a variety of online resources to help you learn. Take a look at our website internationalfallslibrary/online-library-new and explore the amazing classes at Creative Bug for everything form specific projects to general crafting knowledge. Learning Express Library can help you move up the career ladder with a wide range of online career testing, everything from the general civil service exam to nursing and firefighters exams.
We are starting off the year with a concert sponsored by the Arrowhead Library System and funded in part or in whole by a grant from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Join us Thursday, January 9th at 3pm for an all-ages concert by Dennis Warner and the D’s. They have been featured on PBS North and will feature a blend of serious though-provoking songs alongside lighter up-tempo material.