Such a cute and easy display! This display was originally covered with You Wouldn't Want To Be.... and Who Was series which are 2 of our more popular collections at the moment. However, those went fast so some non-fiction titles that aren't quite biographies have been included... 😁

Having Passive Program type Bulletin Boards are SO MUCH FUN!!

Typically, we leave craft supplies and directions out on a table until the bulletin board is either full or we run out of supplies.

This year, we'll be decorating stockings to hang on the fireplace and/or around the Chimney.... Since this will more than likely involve sequins and other sparkly things that are a pain to vacuum we decided to decorate stockings at our Holiday Open House.

Minecraft confuses me- I'll just go straight out and say that, but there's no ignoring its popularity. So because I had NO IDEA how to incorporate Minecraft into a library program, we decided to combine it with our summer reading room decorations. Normally, we'll adorn our walls with properly themed art pieces, but this year, we advertised our Minecraft program as the kids chance to help decorate our room. There were 2 different decorations to make..
 
SCULPTURES 
To construct the base forms, we used small cardboard boxes and mini gift boxes previously ordered from Oriental Trading.

We'd had mini boxes left over from a past program so those were used to create animal sculptures. They were just hot glued together. There's a cow, pig, chicken and creeper.


The original idea was to let the kids stack boxes to make the critters themselves. ...We decided against that, since it actually took me over half a day to get all these guys ready!

Also 3 ghasts were constructed because they're super easy to make. Those were small boxes, folded all the way out with cardboard covering the openings at the top and bottom.

These were decorated using square pieces of construction paper... again, leftovers from a previous craft.


This is how I found myself the morning before the program tracing critters onto poster board.

We had Ender Dragons, spiders, cats and some Zombies. To maintain the pixelated Minecraft look, we used squares cut from tissue paper and crepe paper and glued them onto the bodies.

What I liked about using this instead of the construction paper squares was since they were more translucent you could still see the sharpie outline through the paper.

Interspecies friendships in the Wizarding World are rare. Here are some thoughts on Bill Weasley and goblins.

For Story Crafternoon - our elementary age, after school storytime - we've been reading Aesop's Fables. This week was "The Ant and the Grasshopper".

In this story, a colony of ants are preparing for winter by building up their food stores with hard work. A grasshopper watches on playing music through the night and disturbing the ants sleep. When winter comes, the grasshopper realizes that he is not prepared for the cold months like the ants and begs them to share their food with him. The moral being: There's a time for work and a time for play.

This storytime itself was incredibly short but loads of fun. Typically I like to have a craft, but instead we had a scavenger hunt to find/gather our own snacks like the ants in the story. As kids came in, I had them sit down at the table were we worked on worksheets to unscramble letters to form words. I acted like it was just to pass time, but it really wasn't. 😉

For this hunt, I printed off 16 leaves on green sheets of construction paper to cut out. I hid them in the room, telling them they were all in plain sight except for some that may be underneath chairs or
hidden behind cushions (plastic square cushions stacked in the corner that we use for PreK storyime).

On the backs of these leaves were groups of colored letters.To find their treasure, they had to unscramble these letters to uncover the location to search next. Just like they had been unscrambling words as they came in!

But first, they had to sort the colors.

Once the colors were sorted and words unscrambled, there were 4 locations to search. These were hidden inside certain cabinets, drawers or boxes. .. Which is why it was stressed that no green leaves were hidden inside anything.  I didn't want them to find these boxes prematurely!!

Inside the wrapped packages were candy: Reeses Pieces, Hersey Kisses, etc.

They had to bring the packages to the table and unwrap together, then I let them decide what the best way to divide their loot among themselves by themselves. And actually, they divided it up so there was even some left over for me to share with some kids who came into the Children's Dept after the program! Of course, I don't think they intended for that to happen.

This was a super easy storytime to set up, it got the kids moving, having fun and problem solving. Overall, it was a success and I would definitely repeat this with another group.

Did I mention we talked about ants too? I tried to make it a little educational, but that's not as exciting to type about...

Throughout Harry Potter Book Club at the Library, trivia has been a HUGE crowd pleaser! After a while though, making up trivia questions and answers can get old.

Harry Potter Would-You-Rather Jenga was a nice reprieve.

This combines over 100 either/or questions covering front and back of a single Jenga block.

For these questions, I collected from Kimberly Fidler at Get Away Today Vacations, along with inspiration from this Teachers Pay Teachers link.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to use all the questions I made since not all the kids had read up to the book that we were set to discuss.

So although we were supposed to be reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we were actually only openly talking about events pre-Lupin. But it worked out ok! (Except for that one spoiler we let slip that one time.... 😨) 

 Anyway, it turns out Would You Rather and Jenga are a GREAT mash-up game. Who knew? Let's just hope the tape peals off the wood blocks easily.

For this game we followed standard Jenga rules. The tower was built and we began playing. As each person removed a block, they would answer the Would You Rather question on top and so on.

After a while, the group diverted from the rules and soon, every Would You Rather question became a table top discussion for the group to each answer. 

Questions were taped to both sides of the block so when it came time to rebuild the tower, there would always be a question on the top (this way,  we didn't have to worry about having pieces upside down or not). 

 Click here for a link to my PDF questions.


Or, click the images to enlarge.

I absolutely LOVE that time of year when Teens Top Ten voting comes around! There's something inexplicably exciting about sticking that orange YALSA speech bubble to the top part of a spine on a brand new YA book. At least for me there is.

What's great about this year, is we got to set up the display in our brand new YA area.

At our library we have two separate polls: vote for your favorite book and vote for your favorite book cover. They can choose up to 5 favorites.

In my experience, teens will sooner vote for their favorite cover than book, but it's a way to get their attention and encourage them to try one of those books.

Printing off the ballots on different colored paper doesn't hurt either. It helps prevent confusion when it comes time to tally up the votes.

And while this poll is inside the library, our team has been keeping busy with events outside the building. This means a fun flyer to hand out!

I feel inclined to say that while the YALSA speech bubble is orange, I neglected to take them off all of last years book spines so I might have taken some artistic liberty and changed that color. Just so there was less confusion... I sure hope that's ok!!

Last year the teens asked for a Percy Jackson scavenger hunt, this summer it was Harry Potter (YAY!!)

Because we had done a trivia based scavenger HP hunt earlier in the year with the younger HP book club group, this teen hunt was a little easier on me to create.
Planning a scavenger hunt in the library should be simple as long as you can come up with understandable clues, which I must admit is not my strong suit. In fact, (on reflection) my Percy Jackson hunt did quite a terrible job of explaining and hinting where things were. I'm much more pleased with Harry.

The goal of this hunt is to use the clue sheet to locate all 20 Chocolate Frog Cards and be the first team to do so. 

This clue sheet uses library furniture such as rugs, display cases and study carrels. For example, one clue says to "look for a piece of furniture in the shape of the deathly hallows" and gives a general area on where to find it. This is a little wooden display kiosk that's in the shape of a triangle.

Other clues would require players to use the library catalogue to locate certain material by either providing the author or book title in the clue. An example of this..."Many myths are spread about ginger haired people. Jacky Collis Harvey wrote a unique book on the history of these red haired folk. Locate this book for Ron's card." And of course if they look up this author they'll find we only have one title by her "Red: A History of the Redhead" and the card catalogue will tell them where to find this item.

The goal was to find all 20 chocolate frog cards printed off from Harry Potter Stuff on Tumblr.  This made preparation and set up really quick.  The cards were printed off on cardstock, cut out and hidden in plain sight. The clue sheets were printed off onto cute parchment paper.
Only one set of chocolate frog cards were hidden outside in our library garden. The others were hidden on furniture in the building or inside books.

Aside from written clues, there were 5 puzzle clues inspired by this HP Trivia Treasure Hunt. In fact, that particular game can be purchased from that link. The only thing you have to do is print it off (presumably) and provide clue locations. It looks very neat and was the basis for my HP book club trivia hunt.

Anyway, of these 5 puzzle clues, I made three word searches and two who-doesn't-belong type questions.

To discover the word search clue, players must solve the puzzle. The remaining letters will spell out the title and author of a book, which players must find.

Tip: Be sure to have these books ON HAND when you do this. Of the three word searches made, one book was checked out before I could grab it off the shelf

In the second set of puzzles, the kids had to decide who didn't belong in a house and then the correct answer would lead them to a non-fiction location where their card would be.

All in all, I'm not sure who had more fun with this- me, while I was creating it or the players who got to chase down their treasures. Nothing makes me happier then when I get to share my passion for Harry Potter with other fans. He's meant so much to me over the years.

Do you ever schedule things on the calendar with out having any clue on how you'll pull it together into a program? Because I certainly do... alot. This elementary architectural story time (Story Crafternoon) was no exception.

 
Inner Child Fun had done a fantastic write up on newspaper structures which was the drive to do something similar at our library. Silly me, I hadn't realized how long it would take to roll newspaper into a rod like this so I had kept putting it off until the morning of the program. Thankfully our volunteers were more than willing to spend their entire morning helping roll them for us.
 To start us off we talked about what an architect was and what sort of things they built. We talked about how buildings were made to be functional for whatever group was going to use them, like how a school might be built differently than a library.

We read If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen which is a short adorable book about a boy building a house of his dreams and how it's unique to his own tastes and hobbies. He has a indoor trampolines that lead into a ball pit, a robotic kitchen, a racetrack and a glass bedroom way up in the sky. It's such an imaginative little book that the kids loved.

After reading that, we discussed how we might create our own houses if we could and took a couple minutes to draw our own creatively unique houses. 

One of my favorite houses had a beach built inside. It had sand and the ocean but you couldn't be sunburned at this beach at all. Of course, one kid designed a kitchen where a robot lived so he would never have to wash dishes. Another girl drew her house without a kitchen so she wouldn't have them to even wash them. Sensing a theme here? Kids don't like to wash dishes?

Once we'd had a snack and shared our personalized homes we moved on to the newspaper structures which were a HUGE hit. We spread out and built for nearly 30 minutes. We used pipe cleaners to bind the rods together just like on Inner Child Fun and it worked perfectly. All the kids took their structures home and several even asked if they could have some of the rods and pipe cleaners to take home to continue working on their projects.