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.

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.