5-22-2026

This week we announced the winners of the fourth-grade bookmark design competition.

Each year the Collaborative Summer Library Program (CSLP) selects a theme and slogan and then commissions art work to illustrate that theme. Libraries across the county, including ETLPL, purchase promotional items with that art. That is how the staff ends up all wearing the same shirt on Mondays when our most consistent children’s programs are scheduled: Monday at 1:30 in June and July.

The art work is usually excellent, but we like to see what East Troy can create.

For the past four years Prairie View Elementary art teacher Stephanie Doroba has facilitated a bookmark competition with the fourth-grade teachers. We give her the slogan; she works with the students on creating art in the proper format with the slogan written on it. Last year’s slogan was Color Our World resulted in several designs including a rainbow of color as were the CSLP designs. This year, the two diverged.

The 2026 slogan is Unearth a Story. Picture that for a moment before continuing. That is all the information the students were given.

What the students didn’t know was the theme: dinosaurs, paleontology, and archeology. Not a single design contained any of those elements. While staff will be sporting dinosaurs created by Dan Santat (of Crankenstein and The Adventures of Beekle fame) on our shirts, the winning bookmarks show two outer space drawings and a fairy. Congratulations Domonic, Sophia, and Dahlia for your winning designs. Each student received a gift card for Gus’s. Thank you Ms Doroba for doing all the work for us.

Copies of the bookmarks will be available at the library starting June 1^st when the Summer Reading Program kicks off.

In the meanwhile, Miss Maria has submerged herself in the land of Oz first for the L. Frank Baum birthday celebration. Now for the Teen Trivia Thursday on May 28 at 3:15 she has gone so far as to watch Wicked and Wicked: For Good. Trivia questions will be from the movie writer’s interpretation of the Broadway musical’s interpretation of Gregory Maguire’s book interpreting L. Frank Baum’s books. Or maybe it’s Maguire’s interpretation of the 1939 MGM’s movie interpretation of the L. Frank Baum’s books. That’s a rabbit hole I can draw, but refuse to enter.

Regardless of who is most responsible for the latest hit movies, Miss Maria has done her homework. Questions will be drawn from all three movies listed above. I’m certain there will be snacks.

For those of you wondering who won the favorite Oz character survey, it was Toto.

Reading Now: The Shack by William Paul Young

Listening to Now: The Perfect Divorce by Jeneva Rose ( on a patron recommendation. I checked it out while demonstrating Libby)