Lighthouses

Usually towards the end of May, I'm pretty fried planning our Summer Reading program and am low on ideas for the first half of June. However, this year I found a lighthouse craft that was easy peasy. You see, a few years ago, my intern used battery operated tea lights for a candle holder program. We had 20 tea lights leftover. I don't like to repeat program like that too soon, so I was looking for another way to use them, espeially since they are not cheap.  After some searching I found this cute lighthouse craft online!

It all made perfect sense- it was June so beach days were soon upon us, and Matawan isn't too far from the shore or a lighthouse.  So we read stories about lighthouses (I was afraid they might not exist but they do!), learned some fun facts about lighthouses, and made our own lighthouses to take home. Some of the kids told me that they were going to use it as a nightlight! Now I have another idea for the rest of those tea lights- we'll be making night lights at some point.....

Candy Olympics

This is a program we did during Summer Reading. I figured it would tie in with the cultural theme since I added Olympics to the title and the olympics are an international event- see my logic?

I actually borrowed the idea from another librarian, but expanded on it. We did gobstopper races where the teens balanced a gobstopper on a spoon with the other arm behind their back. They had to make it to a certain point and back without dropping the gobstopper.  We also had m&m sorting. They were each given a cup with m&ms and had to sort all of them by color before the timer ran out.

The last portion of the program was a Miss Chrissie original: CANDY Bingo, or just CANDY.  I made 20 different boards for this game.  Each box had the name of a different kind of candy. I even tried to trick the tweens by putting Hershey bar and Hershey kiss as well as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Reese's Pieces on the board. They used the m&ms from the sorting competition as markers. Needless to say, a fun time was had by all. We also repeated the program for tweens, who also loved it.

Festival of Giving

I'll start out by telling you that this is one of my favorite times of of the year at the library. For the third year in a row, we have held a Festival of Giving during the second week of December.  There is something for everyone during this week long event. This year the Children's Room sponsored a Mitten Tree.  We encouraged patrons to donate new, unused mittens, gloves, hats and scarves for all ages. All donations will benefit the Monmouth County Department of Children & Family Services.  For preschoolers, we shared stories about hats, and then children got to make their own hat! For school-aged children, we read stories about mittens and made mitten wreaths. The library is donating a winter item to our Mitten Tree in honor of each child that attended these programs.

Our after hours tween event this month was Popcorn Art. The tweens made snowmen out of popcorn balls. My part-time librarian, Linda, found some fleece from when we made blankets for the teens for Project Linus in years past. She found a pattern online for scarves where you cut slits and then pull the strings and they make a corkscrew style string. They were pretty cool and the tweens LOVED making them. We are also donating the scarves they made to our Mitten tree.

The Children's Librarian who preceded me, Sara, started a Make a Gift program with the teens over five years ago. I've kept it up since her departure, but it is a ton of work. We create an assembly line of ingredients in our meeting room, and then have our teens volunteer their time to make soup mix & cookie mix in a jar.  I buy all of the ingredients ahead of time (and calculate the math!) This year we donated 108 jars to the Matawan Food Pantry.

During the entire month of December we also have a program called "Food for Fines." We'll forgive library fines and waive the fee for a replacement card with the donation of a non-perishable food item or hygiene item.

Tweens- After Hours

After another successful Summer Reading program, we had finally found a regular following of tweens.  Being in a small library, we only have one meeting room, so it can be difficult to schedule programs at a time that is convenient for everyone. Looking back on the concept of a teen lock-in, and how cool teens thought it was to be in the library after hours, I decided to venture into after hours programming with tweens.  We have done one Friday night program a month, and so far it has worked out really well. We ask that an adult remain in the building during the program, and I leave one circulation computer open if anyone wants to check out materials (I don't take fines or make new cards.)

Here's a running of what we have done so far:

September- Pancake Art
We set up several stations with griddles and colored pancake batter. Tweens then got to squeeze out the different colors onto the griddle to make a colorful pancake creation.

October- Halloween Fun
We did a scary story, made vampire pops and did some icky eats- boogers on a stick (green cheez wiz on a pretzel rod), & ghastly ghosts (bread cut out with a ghost cookie cutter with cream cheese).  Check out the cute vampire pops below.

November- Tie Dyeing and other Fabric Crafts
We set up a few colors of tie dyeing using the Family Fun Magazine method. It is so much easier to make a mix of fabric paint and water. No smells and easy to clean up! The tweens tie dyed shoe laces and cloth pencil cases. They also decorated picture frames and door hangers with fabric paint and other fun artsy supplies.

December- Popcorn Art This was one of the harder programs to prep for. We actually made the popcorn balls ahead of time because we didn't want the recipe to flop on us and we didn't know how long it would take to make them. We also prepared another project of making scarves for our Mitten Tree, so it worked out well that they didn't need alot of time to make their snowmen.

This is what they kind of looked like in the end (I got this pic from Family Fun.)  The tweens used Skittles for the eyes and buttons, and Twizzlers for the scarves.

Happy Birthday Sesame Street!

On Thursday, November 10th we celebrated Sesame Street's 42nd birthday at the library!

Linda and I put together a program for children ages 1 and up that included the big book Elmo Loves You, playing instruments to some of our favorite Sesame Street tunes, a scavenger hunt to find some of our friends from Sesame Street that were hidden around the Children's Room, and an unforgettable Elmo craft.

Check out the pictures below to see what a great time everyone had!

Leaping Lizards!

It's been way too long since I've posted, so I'm going to mad post to get some more programs coming your way!

In April, I had my sister bring her pet gecko, Spot, to the library for a "Leaping Lizards!" program for children in grades K-3. We shared the following stories:

Harvey Moon, Museum Boy by Pat Cummings
Lizard's Home by George Shannon

In between the stories we shared some facts about lizards, and then we made a gecko magnet.

After the craft, the children got to ask questions about Spot, feed him crickets (yum!), and some even got to hold him. I am still asked on occassion if Spot will make another appearance at the library...maybe in the future!