The Summer Reading Club (SRC) Kickoff event launched participants on their reading adventure with a bang on May 31. The theme of the SRC this year focuses on science and the kickoff helped inspire toddlers, children, teens, and adults to both read and explore. Over the course of the hour and a half event, more than five hundred participants came to pick up their SRC materials and enjoy the events offered by Arlington Public Library staff and volunteers.

Cary Siegfried, Director of Libraries, and Dr. Marcelo Cavazos, AISD Superintendent, provided a warm welcome and a few words to express the importance of reading over the summer. The pre-K room had plenty of events for toddlers and their families to enjoy, including wagon rides, parachute play, tunnels, and a variety of toy and blocks to play with. In addition, the children were treated to a performer, Miss Maria, and a storytime Reader's Theater, which featured the popular books, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons and The Day the Crayons Quit.

Meanwhile, in the teen and K-6 room, the buzzword for the day was science. Children got to stretch their creative muscles by building with Legos while the teens built robots to race at the end of the event. Kids gasped at the amazing chemical changes in the fake snow station and then got to test a bit of chemistry themselves by making a take home bag of slime. They experienced the "Fizz" of fizz, boom, read in action at the outdoor Diet Coke and Mentos experiment station. To top it all off, the families could have their picture taken with various props and then sent to them after the event.

The TechLiNK was also present, helping users sign up for the new online SRC tracking system and library books were displayed around the event, all available for checkout to help all of the SRC participants off to an explosive start. The Library would like to thank everyone who participated in the event making it such a fantastic and exciting day for everyone involved.

To register online for the Summer Reading Club, please go to www.MySRC.org or for more information visit www.arlingtonlibrary.org.