Gingerbread Houses

Gingerbread Houses are not just made during the December holiday season! In fact, we normally host an all ages gingerbread house program in December, but since our meeting room has been under construction, our programming has been very limited. We are still able to have our after hours tween programs once a month since we can utilize other parts of the library. On Friday, January 25th tweens braved the snow and came in to design their own gingerbread houses. My sister usually helps me out by collecting milk carts at her school for us to use as a frame.   Our part-time librarian, Linda,  hot glued two of the milk boxes together ahead of time so that the bases would be ready at the start of the program. Also, since we were never able to celebrate Halloween at the library in October due to Hurricane Sandy, we had a bunch of leftover candy that the tweens were able to use to decorate their houses. They picked the candy out and then added frosting and graham crackers to side their house.

I'll leave you with some of their creations:-)

Monkey Lost His Bananas

I came to the realization during our fall storytime series that I need to do more activities with children in storytime.  It just breaks it up and gives them something different each week. I follow ALOT of storytime blogs, and found a favorite activity that I used regularly with my Book Babies last spring called "Little Mouse, Little Mouse." I made seven different colored houses and hid the little mouse in a house.  We would then check the houses to see where the mouse was hiding. There are several variations of this- we did a "Little Bird, Little Bird" in the fall to see which color tree the bird was in.

For our winter sotrytime,  I've come up with an activity for each of our six themes.  Going off the same premise of little mouse, I put together "Monkey Lost His Bananas." Preschoolers know that monkeys love bananas. 

Monkey lost his bananas and doesn’t know where they are. Play this feltboard game with the children. Hide the bananas a few times, and see if they can guess where they are.

Monkey, monkey- are your bananas in the tree?

Monkey, monkey- are your bananas in the car?

Monkey, monkey- are your bananas in the house?

Monkey, monkey- does the dog have your bananas?

It's so easy to make and kids love finding out where the monkey put his bananas!

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!