Secrets of the Geodes: Sneaky STEM

Once you see it you cannot un-see it.

Marge at Tiny Tips for Library Fun detailed our great joint program, the first one of the summer. We wanted to do something about geodes, which we had housed in the porthole that month, a display area regarded with wonder by children all over the city. Wouldn't it be cool if we actually let them touch the stuff from the porthole?! The program description for PR ended with, "after the program, they'll disappear forever." I mean we decided to hold the geode program again before we send them back to the great people at UW Geology Museum but we had no way of knowing that at the time. Additionally, the day after the program the porthole was filled by other collections shared by local kids. If I wasn't planning this program I would've been totally freaked out by my librarian magic.

Undercover Spy Club: Passive Program

This summer, our library was planning to have a "Hometown Tourist" program that partnered with local businesses for a city-wide experience. As a department, we put our heads together and tried to figure out what would resonate with kids-- you show me a 4 year old who knows what it means to have a hometown and I'll show you my skeptical-maybe-judgey face. Okay, kids get it's "home", but: why is it cool? Why should they even care? What else is there? It's definition vs connotation, and the Hometown Tourist initiative is awesome for the latter. But how could we get kids to care?

So You Want to be an ALA Emerging Leader

So I'm back from ALA Annual, everyone!

I've had this post in the hopper for awhile but I figured I'd wait until after the poster session to put it up, in case it turned out I really hated everything. There were a few weeks in there that were pretty hectic, and I wasn't sure if we could pull it off, but we rallied and got everything done on time! Here's a link to my finished product that is part of a four-part series of adult learning tutorials, a project proposed by LIRT. This year we were able to pick our own projects to work on, and this one was my second choice. You wouldn't believe how many people were like, "What does adult learning have to do with being a children's librarian?" And I'm just like, well, everything, actually.

Grumpy Cat looking grumpy. Meme-style texts reads,
"Apply for Emerging Leaders? Fine. Maybe I will."

My real reason for writing this post is the lack of help I found in my first stages of applying for Emerging Leaders. As I mentioned before, when I searched for terms like, "I applied for Emerging Leaders and was rejected how will I ever get over myself" I'd get results that were written by the Done-Emerged about whether or not I should apply.