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.

What little kid doesn't love voting? So when local elections came up in our city, we held our own elections at the library with candidates of our own!

Clifford the Big Red Dog VS Doreen Cronin's Duck.

We invited one of the local candidates to read these two stories. Afterwards, kids and parents were invited to participate in our elections by voting for which story/character they liked the best.


We printed off Voter Registration Cards from online which had to be filled out before we let them into our voting booth.

For our voting booth, we pulled out the puppet stage and stuck a table inside. They could pretend like they were going behind the curtain to vote just like in real elections!





Voters had to sign our Voter Registration list before they were given a ballot.

Our ballot!

Inside the booth was a box, where voters could drop their ballot.

Once everyone who wanted to vote had voted, we tallied up the results and shared them with the group.

This program was low-maintenance, exciting and different from our usual story times. Best of all, it's easily repeated.

Last summer our teen-driven Iron Chef program was so well perceived that they requested it again for this summer. And when you have such enthusiasm to plan an event like this from teens, then you HAVE to do it right! As someone who still hasn't seen the show, without our teens and fellow librarian blogs, I would have been at a complete loss on where to begin with this.

The main thing the teens wanted from this program was to create, eat and be judged but they were very concerned that I give them a secret ingredient to work with. Of course, this stumped me the most.  Last year it was green apples; this year it was blueberries and/or strawberries. Some other options were graham crackers or chocolate.

Two weeks before the program, our department had received a phone call letting us know someone would be bringing a group of 12 to the event. So when I went out the day of the program to buy supplies I bought quite a bit more that I normally would have.

Some ingredients not pictured above are milk, eggs, whip cream, spray butter, melted chocolate and of course our berries. The crowd favorites are always the pie crusts and tortillas.

To get us started we decide on groups (teams of two) and rules. Last time we played where each team claimed different ingredients but it ended up where the teams just shared what they all wanted. So this time, instead of ingredients being exclusive to separate teams,  we all just shared everything. They were given the option to have one item that could be exclusive to their team but decided against it. We really just let them make their own rules :p

On a separate table from the ingredients we had a work station which was assortment of baking and mixing supplies. This included a griddle, a chocolate melting pot, blender and an assortment of mixing bowls along with spoons, spatulas and alike. Cleaning the blender bowl sure did keep me busy though!
 

Pardon the ugly pink tablecloth *gag*

Each group made enough samples to share with the other teams before presenting their creation to the group.

To decide winners, each person was given two pom poms as voting chips with the instruction that only one team member could vote for themselves once. The two winning team mates were given colorful wire whisks with a badge that said Iron Chef Winner and the other groups were each allowed to choose something special out of our SRP prize box.

All in all, this is one of TAG's favorite, most talked about program of the summer and I'm sure we'll be bringing it all out again next year. Tip for next time though, you can never have too much whip cream!

You'll run up two different staircases to reach door to Skyrim. Go outside door and towards tower on left.

This month in Harry Potter Book Club, we made wands!

The basis of this craft came from Instructables and is made using paper and hot glue. It went over very well with our tween age group, although we did have some younger participants who needed a bit more help. Honestly, I was a little hesitant to pull out the hot glue gun like this for a program but it went fine.

QUIZ 
To personalize the experience, I designed a quiz to determine what wood your wand would be carved
from and what core would be inside. 

Click here for the Quiz PDF

The 12 question quiz is broken up into 2 parts. The top part will determine the wood and the bottom half will determine the core.

For the wood we used different color tissue paper.

For the core's, we gathered strips of ribbon that were at the bottom of our ribbon box and of course for the Phoenix tail feather, we HAD to use warm-colored feathers!

CONSTRUCTION
The steps from Instructables are very straightforward.

Our wands were rolled diagonally with a sheet of paper and tapered them so one end came to a point,
as per instructions.

We did deviate a bit in how we made our wands sturdy. This was by adding tissue paper (AKA our wood) into the center (and also the core).

Once wands were filled, we plugged the ends with dabs of hot glue and added surface details.

DECORATION

All that was left to do was decorate, which we used paint and glitter to do.

I wasn't able to snag too many pictures of the process, but here are a couple completed wands...

As a Librarian, I have a love/ hate relationship with glitter and if I were to do this program again, I might leave the demon litter in the craft cabinet. Cleaning it up was a nightmare.

But overall, this was so much fun! Good luck in your wand making. Hope you can use the quiz.

Story Crafternoon is a program our library offers to elementary aged kids, who have gotten too old for our preschool story time. This program typically involves a story and a craft or activity. With Easter coming up, I really wanted to do something involving peeps and found a cute program called "Protect Your Peeps".  There wasn't very much description of the program at all but overall, the impression I got was it had something to do with floating
peeps on a raft. So that's what we did!  

Rafts were built using large Popsicle sticks and duck tape.

The idea was to see how many peeps your raft could hold, without sinking or peeps falling off into the water. ... And surprisingly enough, we had no problems with drowning peeps or sinking rafts.

We used two clear plastic tubs and filled them halfway with water to float our rafts.

I did have trouble finding a good storybook to relate to the activity though, so instead I opted to tell the story of John Wesley Powell, the first man to sail down the Colorado River.

In the Children's department, we did have an easy-ish book Down Colorado by Deborah Kogan Ray, but since it was longer than the kids are used to, I wasn't sure about reading it. Telling the story worked out great though!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story... John Wesley Powell was a nature enthusiast and 

loved exploring outdoors. He lost his arm at the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Afterwards he began to teach and made many trips out west with his students, where he began to form a plan on how he would explore the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River (which no one had ever mapped before). With a few boats and men, he set out to map the river. The river consisted of many dangerous rapids and waterfalls and as their journey progressed, some of the men left the party.

 On the 96th day they came upon what looked to be most dangerous rapid they had seen! Three of the men were certain that if they were to attempt to proceed down the rapid they would all die. These men decided to turn around and leave as John Wesley Powell and the remaining crew continued on. It turned out that the rapid was not nearly as terrible as they had thought and within minutes had safely passed. 

Three days later, Powell and the crew reached the end of the river. So if those three men had stayed just a little longer, they could have made history but instead, they backed out when things got rough.