This is a Guest Post by Maria Hughes of childrensbookstore.com
Hosting activities and events at your bookstore can not only help promote literacy, it can also generate valuable business for your store, and establish you as a community place. There are a myriad of events and activities you can host, but if you’re out of ideas and all the activities you’ve been hosting seem to be a bit stale, here are a few more fresh, kid and family-oriented ideas that will help promote literacy and help you grow a customer base for your business.
Host a Costume Party
If a popular book such as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games is coming out, a great event to host would be a costume party. You could also hold this event around Christmas or Halloween to go with the holiday season. If you have crafting books or books on making costumes, make sure you display them prominently before and during the event. Pass out flyers and perhaps provide some refreshments, and your party will be sure to start generating some buzz. Encourage a recitation contest where the children act quote lines from their character.
Host a Theatre Production
Although this is a rather ambitious idea, it may seem more daunting than it actually is. If you are interested at all in hosting a theatrical event, you may try starting out small, with perhaps a puppet show or even just an open mic for monologue or dialogue performers. Be careful that open mics don’t get off track though; make sure all performers know that the content of their pieces must be family friendly.
If you do decide you can handle hosting a play (you can decide how technical you make the event, based on your space limitations and other resources) you might charge or ask for donations to give to a local literacy or child-care charity. This is both a great way to get people into your store, and a wonderful way to raise money for charitable organizations.
Hold and Record Read-a-Loud Sessions
Did you know that Project Gutenberg needs many, many books to be read and recorded in order to make public domain works available to people with disabilities? Why not set up a reading group that could meet every week and read plays together or even just children’s books or poetry?
Eat!
Do you have a local group of food-lit nerds? You know, the people who are always attempting to recreate the dishes they find out about while reading The Game of Thrones, Pride and Prejudice, or other period literature? If you can host a potluck you may be able to get people into their store… along with their yummy dishes.
You might try making the event accessible to children by making the food that’s mentioned in children’s literature, like “green eggs and ham,” for instance.
Set up Free Tutoring and Support Refugee Families
You might try working with local high school students or college students to set up free tutoring sessions. At my local bookstore this was done successfully with refugees. You might try introducing individual refugees or refugee families with local families who can provide free tutoring or school supplies for them. Why not hold a potluck where refugees can show off their cultural heritage, or just a mult- cultural open mic, where refugees can perform monologues in their own language, and explain their stories in English as well?
Bookstores can be an extremely powerful community place if owners decide to turn them into a tool to promote social change and encourage literacy. Hopefully at least one of these ideas is something you can try at your bookstore, or will at least get you thinking about how to grow your business while helping your community.
+Maria L Hughes is a children’s book enthusiast, parent, and online publisher for childrensbookstore.com. She enjoys blogging about reading and kid’s books.
