is October 16th every year, according to Thereisadayforthat.com.  Naming quirky looking cats is a fun and easy way to celebrate!

Talk Like A Pirate Day is every year on September 19th. For this year, I changed my interactive bulletin board to ask library users what their pirate name would be. 

This is the generator I came up to find your pirate name. It includes my dads childhood nickname for me on the right side - I won't disclose what name that is. 

Unbeknownst to me, my coworker had a similar chart already made up from several years ago. I threw
both signs on the board and let the kids decide which chart/name they wanted to write on a skull to be attached to the board. 

Here's a close up of the 2 as they were on the board . . .

My name would either be Swashbuckler Kidd or Rotten Navigator. What would yours be?

 

 

 

When you get new books at the library, what better way to get them checked out than to build an interactive table around them?

For this table, free-handed a race track on poster board.

Racecars were printed off and instructions were very simple: color a car, cut it out and then glue it to the track.

The poster board is actually double sided - there is a different track on the back. 

(It was painstakingly traced in colored pencil because of that. When you trace using a sharpie or a marker, it bleeds through to the other side, then I wouldn't have been able to do front and back.)

Of course, I also tried to throw in an educational concept too!

 Mo Willem's Pigeon returns to the bulletin board in this simple Christmas themed display. 

This was a recreation of my 2019 bulletin board, don't let the Pigeon design the bulletin board.

YIKES! Hopefully I've gotten better at hanging bulletin paper!

Passive Program Bulletin Board

 

In addition to a book display, this poster board prompt was put out on a table the week prior to July 4th. 

All the answers were really great! The one that most people commented on was, "I would change gas prices". 

Our Poetry Month Passive Program table in the Youth Services Department focused on acrostic poems and nursery rhymes.

These are vertical poems in which each letter begins a word.

 

May 2 is International Harry Potter Day. Here are 2 activities that I threw together to celebrate Harry Potter for the week.

Eat Slugs, Malfoy!

For inspiration, I was flipping through Jim Kay's illustrated version of Chamber of Secrets when this idea came to me. I knew I wanted something eye grabbing, right as kids walked into the room and this was it. 

The concept behind this was, if Ron's curse had worked as it should have, Draco would have been vomiting up slugs instead of Ron. 

So for this, kids could color slugs and put them in Draco's mouth. Weird, yes but the kids LOVED it!

Here's a bit more on how my Draco was built . . . 

The second activity was another poster board prompt, my most recent passive program obsession. 

Question: There are hundreds of characters in the Harry Potter series. How many can we list?

There were repeats on the board (I expected there to be) and a few people who were too shy to contribute because they couldn't think of un-named characters (even though I encouraged them to write duplicates) but all in all, this table got a good deal of traffic. 

Undoubtedly, there would have been more participation if I had chosen a different prompt but I wanted to do something different. 

 

To make the action bubbles, I cut out the shape on colored cardstock and then cut out a smaller version of the shape on regular printer paper. 

The smaller white shape was glued on top of the larger shape. 

There were 3 different shapes I used: 1 bubble cloud and 2 zig-zag-starbursty shapes. 

Here's a messy template for the 2 different sized starburst shapes. 

TEMPLATE FOR COLORED CARDSTOCK 💚 PRINT 3 

 TEMPLATE FOR WHITE PRINTER PAPER 💚 PRINT 2

If you have teen volunteers, this would be a good project for them to work on! 

But hope this helps inspire you or helps you find a direction for your bulletin board.