This is Nick Madsen, the Young Adult Librarian for the Community Library Network at Hayden. This blog will be filled with program ideas, cool websites, and book reviews.
It might be a little late for Super Bowl party ideas (or ridiculously early lol), but these activities were a lot of fun, and might work for some other things too.
I "Heart" books
You know those fans that write messages like, "Kaepernick is the best" or "I 'heart' Flacco?" Well I thought it would be cool if we did the same thing with books =D
Paper Football
Some of my friends will be really bored at a restaurant or something, and inevitably, out comes the paper football. Did you know that there is actually a fun (albeit simple) game that goes along with it?
Target Practice
What's better than throwing a bunch of plastic balls at oatmeal containers, paper towel rolls, and cups? Not much apparently hehe. This was one of our favorite activities actually.
Food
I figured that a Super Bowl party wouldn't be complete without the food, so we bought some chips and some pop, and all together, we had a great time!
For a while now, I've been trying to get some Middle School programs off the ground at my library. Over the summer, we had some really fun times with Creepy Scavenger Hunt and Tell Your Own Ghost Stories, but once Fall and Winter shows up, attendance disappears. Well, until we made our own doughnuts =D
When I first started thinking about the program, I thought it might be complicated to make your own doughnuts, but it turned out I was wrong. Crispy and Creamy Doughnuts was a recipe I found on allrecipes.com that had a lot of positive reviews (reviews are awesome!), and the doughnuts themselves turned out to be awesome!
Unless you have a two hour time slot for your program, I would suggest making the actual dough beforehand. (FYI for those who don't know about about cooking, if the yeast won't foam, add a little sugar for the yeast to start eating. Worked like a charm for me, and thank you awesome coworkers for giving me this tip!)
One thing I wasn't planning on, but the students really enjoyed, was making their doughnuts into different shapes. Some looked like stars, pretzels, and twists, while others stuck to a more traditional shape.
The Crispy and Creamy Doughnuts recipe is based on cooking them in oil, and I let each student dunk their own. Please explain that they should place them in the oil instead of dropping them in the oil =D Once the doughnuts were cooked, the recipe called for a glaze. But we decided to melt some chocolate chips with a little butter and made a chocolate sauce instead.
When all was said and done, we had some delicious doughnuts and some happy Middle Schoolers.
So each year, the Collaborative Summer Library Program (representatives from each state team up to offer better and more affordable summer reading programs) chooses three themes; one for kids, one for teens, and one for adults. This year, the teen theme is Own the Night. In addition to choosing a theme, they also offer incentives and prizes and a manual full of program ideas.
One of the suggested programs was making up your own ghost stories, so I thought we'd make a program out of it by giving our older tween group (6-8 grade) some suggestions and then videotape what they came up with.
I figured that like most stories, there were certain things that a ghost story would need (who, what, where, etc.) and I wrote the questions down and some possible answers to them. I gave an answer sheet to each participant, made up my own story to show that it wasn't that bad, and then let them at it. I've posted some of the videos on my YouTube Channel, and the rest will be coming soon.
Enjoy!
P.S. Here's the questions that I asked just in case the program sounded interesting :)
Who are you?
(TV reporter, Ghost survivor, local farmer)
When did you
first hear about it? (Childhood, 10 minutes ago, sometime last year)
How do you
know about it? (Lived through it, your friend survived it, heard it from some
neighbors)
What is this
thing called? (The Big Hairy, Terribleautapus, The Reptile)
When did it
come into existence? (18th century, last week, every eclipse)
How did it
come into existence? (freak experiment, untimely death, no one knows)
Where does it
lurk now? (an old house, graveyard, in the library)
Why should we
be afraid of it? (decapitation, tickles people to death, creeps up and says
boo)
As many of you know, making stuff with Duct tape is awesome, and I couldn't resist doing a Duct
Tape Creations program anymore. So, we made Duct Tape wallets with Duck Tape brand tape and it was amazingly fun :)
We did this program for our Elementary (3-6 grade) and Middle School (6-8 grade) patrons. I hadn't actually created anything with Duct tape before, so I asked one of our Teen volunteers to sit in on our Middle School programs and give some pointers. I also took advantage of a couple websites that broke the whole process down for me. Enjoy :)
P.S. I found that only having 6 rolls of duct tape for 18 kiddos (what happened for our Elementary program) doesn't quite work out. It takes quite a while to get anything done because they had to wait so long for the duct tape. If I were to do it again, I'm thinking of having 1 roll of duct tape for every 2 people that are there. I would also have duplicates of the same colors so if one is over here, than one can be over there. Just some thoughts on the logistical side of things, and now to the websites. Pretty much I found a whole bunch of useful ideas on Instrutables and wikiHow.
So, every Monday from 4-5pm, we do a program for 3-6 graders. The first Monday we have Play With Your Food, where we bake and cook. The second Monday we do Ka-Boom, where we have fun doing science experiments. On third Mondays we have Couldn't Put It Down, which is a gaming and technology time. Finally, we have Express Yourself on fourth Mondays which is us making crafts.
In addition, we just started a program for Middle Schoolers, 6-8 graders, called Tuesday Works, and we're going to be doing something fun and different each month.
Oh, I almost forgot about our High School programs. We have a Next-Gen Advisory Team that meets to brainstorm cool things for Teens to do at the library, and we also just started a book club called TeenBookWorms.
As I thought about these programs, I thought that someone, somewhere, might be interested in what we did, and how we did it. So, when I get the chance, I'm going to do a quick blog post with resources and a quick breakdown on what we did, how we did it, and how it went. Hope you like the idea =D
Target Practice
