Summer Reading Newbie

Other

Hello! I'm a new children's librarian in a medium-sized library. I'm completely in charge of the SRP. Not only have I never run one, I had never heard of it!

My general game plan is to have students log minutes read. Then they get a ticket for every 60 minutes. Maybe I have a free book at 7 tickets, a free meal to a local restaurant at 5 tickets etc. I also have larger book prizes, like the first five books in a series, that I will list at a higher ticket count. And they can choose to put their tickets into the end-of-program raffle, which will be two larger prizes (free entrance into a local theme park and free entrance into a local kid's museum. I've already sourced these!)

I don't know if this is a good way to run the program. I tried poking through the SRP tag on this sub, but didn't find many posts talking about prize logistics and how they're won. I also had not considered a sign up prize. Would a bookmark and a sticker be sufficient? I wanted to focus on activity-based prizes instead of physical stuff, so I didn't get a lot from the CSLP store.

Is my ticket count too high? Is logging minutes a bad idea?

Sorry if this is all common knowledge! Thanks so much for your advice!

Posted Feb 19, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

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