Do It Yourself Day

The Monday of the public schools' Spring Break, I orchestrated a Do-It-Yourself in the children's department. The idea was inspired by this book.

I loved the idea of DIY Day for the following reasons:
1. We could get rid of a bunch of junk from the basement.
2. I am not at all crafty, and the complete lack of my involvement in the actual crafts was appealing to me.
3. We could get rid of a bunch of junk from the basement.

We planned for a come-and-go 3 hours worth of crafts, which actually turned out to be the perfect amount of time. 11am-2pm stretched right through for the before lunch/after lunch crowd. We overlapped an hour with story time, which meant we needed to utilize the homework tables by the Boredom Busters, but I was still glad to do it then. We actually got a lot of kids who might not have come, because their baby siblings were in storytime!

I had originally planned for maybe 20 kids, but ended up, at the end of three hours... with 57 TOTAL. Whoa. It was even a nice day! Go outside and grill various meats!

Connecting with Teachers

It’s very interesting, outside of the education world: people are afraid to talk to teachers. I don’t mean everyone, and I don’t mean librarians. I mean in the general sense of everything. They are seen as exclusive, defensive, and stubborn. And they are, sometimes. And I can’t blame them. Probably because I was one of them.

Two Keys to Library Field Trips: Time and Bodies

This post is about our Library Stars tour FIELD TRIP ADVENTURE, and can be considered on its own or as a continuation of this post.

Very soon—perhaps alarmingly soon—after your grant has been accepted, it’s time to plan what the tour will actually look like. The schools, with whom you’ll be collaborating, will want to know intricate details about the tour.  In the early stages of planning and school collaboration, this may feel excessive; but having your hows/whys down will help solidify teacher buy-in and satiate all worriers.

And with the worriers, you may encounter two of the most worrisome hindrances to tours on the library’s end—Time and Bodies.

Writing a Successful Grant Proposal

As funding for programs continue to get cut, a great way to fund your passive programming library initiatives (the ongoing stuff that may bolster check-outs with minimal extra staff time in the long run) is through grants.

As school funding gets cut, so does funding for extraneous frivolities like gym and field trips. For our Library Stars initiative, we knew that a large part of getting all second graders to visit us during school hours required about 14 buses. Buses are expensive, between gas prices and extra pay for the driver. We knew that if we couldn't offer to pay for the buses, it would be an uphill battle for schools to agree to visit (no matter how much they would like to, personally). So that's what our grant application asked for.

Book Trailer Making Program for Kids

Friday was a no-school day for the kids in my city, so I thought I would tackle something that I've wanted to do with kids since I learned of its inception: the creation of book trailers. Because I knew it was going to be pretty involved, I had registration and capped it at 10; 7 registered, and I ended up with three (hey, it was a sunny, warm, no-school Wisconsin Friday in February).

Film reel

The kids who did show up were from other program that I've run; 2 from Wednesday-ology and one from the Garfield party. Knowing them like I did already, I couldn't ask for a better group to try out a brand-new program that was entirely conceived, written, and implemented while I was hyped-up on cold medicine.

Monsterology

Halfway through the Wednesday-ologies, and I started to get a little crazy. Well maybe not crazy, but I decided to run with Monsterology into this Crypto-zoology wonderland.

My search, as always, began downstairs in the Shelves that Craft Day Forgot. There, I found glow-in-the-dark bracelets, and farmer's hats. Upstairs, I found passport-like stickers left over from the Summer Reading Program. Put the stickers on the farmer hat, and you have a great Indiana Jones hat.

So with this, I decided to make nametags with ______ Jones on them, with the ______ being the name of a state. I have a LEGO Indiana Jones keychain on my library lanyard, so naturally that name was taken; then I took the name Wisconsin Jones, Wisconsin being the state our library is in. All fights averted, I randomly handed out other state names to the kids.

We learned about monsters according to the Monsterology book. Here's a write-up of what was taught (I had pictures so that the kids could get good visuals. Never underestimate a Google image search and a quality color printer.You can skip to the activity if you don't care; my feelings will not be hurt. MAYBE my pride):

Pirate-ology

Now that we're in the Wednesday-ology swing, I decided to go this time with pirate-ology. Yar har!

I set the mood with a few CDs by the incomparable Captain Bogg & Salty, a pirate-themed children's band from the Pacific Northwest. Like last week's Spyology, I brought back the nametag idea. This time, I pre-populated a sheet of 20 nametags with pirate names, and had the kids pick them at random from a bag. My personal favorite was a little kindergartener who totally owned the name "Muscle-Arm Jones". Other examples of names were Sloppy Skipper, Happy Shoes, Rusty Boot, and Gilly Grog. Yes, I made these up from the top of my head. It took a disproportionately short time to do. But hey, when you're listening to Captain Bogg & Salty....

In case you were wondering, I also had a nametag; I am a cheeseball, after all. My name was Cap'n Pegleg, of course, as Pegleg is my undergrad nickname and remains, for the most part, the only name I will respond to in a crowded place (do you know HOW MANY PEOPLE are named "Sara[h]"?! My best friend in undergrad shared my biblical name, which I'm sure would've confused a whole lot of people if my name wasn't actually Pegleg instead).

Spy-ology

Wednesdays in February I decided to hold camps/classes based on the Ologies series. My first -ology was Spyology. Seventeen school-age attendees learned about all things Spy-related. For effect, the Agent Cody Banks soundtrack was played in the background.

Gaming for Elementary Kids: A Program, Full Stop

Last week I held a program on a no-school day. It was two hours long, and was especially for kids over 8 years old.


And we went on....

...the Internet.

Preschool Tour: Dog's Colorful Day



 After the success of the school-aged tourlibrary Field Trip ADVENTURE!, we decided to revamp the preschool tour library Field Trip ADVENTURE!.

As always, the preschool tour we offer revolves around a book. Last year was "Knuffle Bunny" by Mo Wilems. This year the book du jour is "Dog's Colorful Day" by Emma Dodd.

Cover of the book "Dog's Coloful Day":
A wyote dog with a black spot on its ear sniffs a rainbow bone

Childn00B Programming

Okay, so the title's pushing it since there's no clever way to incorporate my #n00brarian status. Or there is, but my sad trombone wittiness has been beaten out of me by a horde of children whose only weakness was Spiderman books (but at least they had one!). It's the calm after the storm now that my Spidey sense for misbehaving children has been deactivated (or, maybe it's more of a release valve. It slowly hisses out).

I constantly think of stuff to do at the library. Like, when I'm in the shower, in the middle of the night, watching a horror movie (not all at the same time). But, being new, I did have a fear of planning something that doesn't sound good. Not for fear it would fail, but the fear of something like this: