Built-in Self-Regulation: A DOAWK Book Launch Story

I held a DOAWK "The Long Haul" party a few weeks ago,and I was originally going to write that up. I still will, here, with a free downloadable PPT so you can make one too; but it was what I added last-minute the night before (isn't that always the case?) that I really want to talk about.

SO. DOAWK at my library has a wide appeal, and a very small but incredibly fandom-like hoard who attend our DOAWK programs each and every year. This year, there were around 15 kids in attendance. I go back and forth about whether I want to keep doing these for 15 kids, but I'm glad I did this year.

Anyway, wanting to keep it fresh and also appropriately geeked-out, I went for something I hadn't tried before:

Spring Break at the Library: Stealth Programming For Days

So first off all, can we give a big round of applause to Chris from Criplold for her stellar  redesign of my blog? She's a graphic design artist, and had an awesome deal while she was distracting herself from other things. Chris is lovely to work with and hella creative. And I don't use the word "hella" lightly. Do you think I came up with any of this? Absolutely not. This is 100% Chris, and I'm kinda in love with it. Hit her up at her blog or on Twitter  to tell her how cool she makes me look, and to ask how you can be cool too.

OKAY, SO: Spring Break. The one week in the school year that tells you what a wuss you've become since last Summer Reading; the glimpse of what's to come that makes you rethink your day for maximum caffeine consumption. This Spring Break for our public schools also was National Library Week, and our library had a program where people could take selfies of themselves, tag them online with a hashtag, and be entered in a drawing for gift cards. I loved this idea, and was sure patrons would be into it; but in YS we looked for ways it could translate for kids.

Of course, there was only one answer:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 8 Party

Fregley is gawking creepily at your book choices to help me tell you about the Diary of a Wimpy Kid party we recently held at my library for the Book 8 launch. We usually have it closer to the launch date, so we can get the event kit, etc, but I noticed that last year the kids who wanted to put the new book on reserve on that day were already facing a reserve line of 50+.  An early release day about a month ahead of time? PERFECT.

AND, it lets me give all you awesome readers some free stuff to make your upcoming Wimpy Kid party a snap.

Here's how it went down:

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.