The Mission: A Guest Post by Miss Julia in OH

Have you ever seen something cool to do in a library and thought, "well, okay, but I can't do that with MY resources?" Welcome to Librarians Don't Play: what I hope to be a series of guest posts about implementing programs/field trip adventures/story action pods I post on my blog in varying libraries across the country, each librarian putting their own spin on it, or simply being inspired by something that they see here and turning it into something all their own.  

Or, you know, anything, really. I'm not the do-all-end-all of kid's programming, and I'm acutely aware that this is the case. If you want to share an awesome program you've done and you want to try blogging about it, you can contact me, too. 

If you want to give it a try, please e-mail me at brycedontplay at gmail dot com. 

This post is by Miss Julia, a Youth Services Librarian in Ohio, based on my write-up for a Spyology program. Please feel free to email her here and check out her new library-related blog, Laughter and Literacy. All links inside the post are hers.

Ninjago Library Party

Source (seriously, you have to get these books)

At long last, we ran our no-school Ninjago party. To be honest, the total prep time for this program was 3 hours, but it was extremely high-yield at 95 attendees. That is seriously more than I've seen in my time at this library for a program at our library that didn't have a guest or hired performer.
Thanks to the extra prep time, I was prepared. And I'm going to write it out for you all, and link to some resources I found helpful, so that your prep time (and my future prep time; I will be doing this again) will be considerably less than that for the same quality program.

The Think-Aloud Librarian

Source

Over the weekend, I helped an 8 year old girl find a "Jack and Annie book." I led her to the Magic Treehouse books, talking the whole time: "Oh yeah! The Magic Treehouse books. I know exactly where those are. They are in our Chapter Book section, under O. The author's last name is Osbourne. So here's books by authors who start with N.... Okay, O! Here we go, Osbourne. Right here."

Sound familiar?
You're a Think-Aloud Librarian.

Why Do We Do This? 
It sounds like we're talking to ourselves, right?
In the education world, we call it the "think-aloud": a little tidbit that helps students follow your train of thought or reasoning; or, in a student-directed lesson, help you understand the student's train of thought or reasoning. In either instance, it's a chance an opportunity for learning.

Connecting to Kid Culture

When I was teaching second grade, all the kids liked everything I liked: our collective favorite book was Lafcadio: the Lion Who Shot Back; our collective favorite dinosaur was the parasaurolophus; our collective favorite show was Between the Lions. These are kids who had to be issued pencils before each activity because they demonstrated they would hurt each other, but I'd mention Uncle Shelby and they'd all want to hear whatever weird story about him I made up getting ready that morning. Truth is, everything my class liked was everything I had liked as a kid.