Monsters Afterschool

One program that was passed onto me recently was Story crafternoon, which has recently been re-branded as Makerspace. It is typically for school aged kids but at libraries, sometimes you never know who will show up! We've had anywhere from 4 year old to 6th graders come to these programs (and it can be rough when these extremes show up on the same day). This has been an assortment of activities from balloon rockets to minecraft mosaics to paper art. Sometimes there will be a story to go along with it, but if there's not, we really don't sweat it.

For this months story crafternoon we read Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance by Keith Graves. It's an incredibly short, cute story about Frank who wants to dance so he goes to the theater, where he dances on stage for an audience until his body parts start falling off. It has rhyming, fantastically vibrant pictures and it's just gross enough for this age to be intrigued.

After we talked about the book, we made monsters together on the wall. This a mixture between musical chairs and that game you used to play in highschool where you would pass a piece of paper between you and your bestfriend and you would each add something to the page.

 Anyway, blank monster shapes were stuck to the wall, and monster accessories (eyes, horns, noses, mouths, spikes, etc) were spread out over chairs. Music played (The Monster Mash and theme to Ghostbusters) and the kids walked around the chairs. When the music stopped, kids had to pick one thing off the chair they were standing closest to and stick it on a monster. One chair just had candy sitting on it but the kids were much more interested in adding to the monster and we played until we ran out of sticky tack.

Our craft inspiration came from this website. I had tried using a plastic paper plate for the example, which I wouldn't recommend with liquid glue. Paper plates worked best for the kids.

Overall, it seemed to go over well for very little planning.  I try planning programs that are a bit more generic than holiday oriented. Christmas and Halloween don't offend me, but I sure don't want to offend anyone else! So naturally Monsters seemed like a good balance between halloween and October as just another month. :)