Program: Sphero Coding Club

The Children's librarian and I have started a 4 week Sphero club where we teach the kids how to use block coding to program their Spheros. Thanks to Sphero.edu, there are plenty of tutorials that will make up a majority of the sessions.

If you have these little robots, it's worth starting a program based around them. We had five kids today (would have had more but two cancelled).

Highly recommended.

Spher(woes)...

That was a super corny title... 

I've already broken my New Years resolution. Posting on a blog, working, and taking care of a three-legged cat is proving to be very difficult.

All of the fun.

Thus far, in April, I've had two really successful programs. One was a coding program, where two people came in to show the kids JavaScript, and the other was my STEAM-Powered Drop In.

I've come to find that when doing my STEAM-Powered Drop In, I want to include all ages, rather than just teens. So I decided to hold it in the library (as opposed to our programming room, which isn't connected to the main building). Well, I got the numbers I was hoping for ... but as for the chaos, it definitely ensued. By opening the program up to younger kids, I found myself being pulled every which way to show them how to use the Spheros. And some kids were a little too small to figure out how to maneuver them. I hate admitting when I need help, but if there was ever a day where help was needed, it was last Friday.

Towards the end of the program, the majority of the kids left over were invested in their Lego building and got sick of rolling the Spheros around the lobby (phew!), so I got to relax and discuss our spherical friends with a couple of fathers who were interested in them. There is a need for coding and learning how to program these little things... it's just that when it comes down to it, the kids would rather roll them around and knock them into things rather than block code.

Shout out to anyone in librarian world who can help me try to push the blockcoding agenda.

As someone who can barely do HTML (thank you LiveJournal for teaching me via layout making), introducing the patrons to programming is tough. I want to do it all myself, but I am just completely inept. Thankfully, the JavaScript program (shout out to LearnToCodeNJ) is exactly what I need. The kids get to learn from professionals and I don't have to embarrass myself pretending like I know what I'm doing.

I can finally check 'having a successful outside program' off of my list.

Slime (aka NEVER AGAIN)

It's been a while since I've posted. I've been busy with personal and work related things.

However, I want to post about SLIME.

I've done a slime program twice: the first was around Halloween when we did edible slime, and the other was two weeks ago when I did St. Paddy's day slime. I should have went with my gut by not doing another slime program, as the first one ended in me scrubbing the floor for an hour after the program was over. But, I figured it couldn't get worse than that.

HAHA.

Slime is such a popular phenomena. Everyone has done it. Mostly all kids know how to make it. I'm still working on it. I had a few recipes, but for some reason my brain was like "USE BORAX" so I bought borax. I knew we had glue in the children's section, so I knew I was covered on that base. I printed the directions, bought trinkets for the slime (St. Paddys Day = Treasure Slime), and set up the table.

Maybe 9 kids registered, and I had an influx of non-registered kids who were way too young to join in the fun. I was one person dealing with a lot of people, so having kids under 5th grade level was not in the cards for me. Also, the tweens I had join me were moving way too fast to follow directions, so I can't even imagine small children having the ability to follow them (even with three ingredients).

Anyway, the point is that it was a fail. Apparently I used Elmer's "glue-all" instead of just regular glue, so none of the slime actually "slimed" up. I tried keeping mess contained but it was EVERYWHERE. A table actually fell over at no fault of the kids involved (benefit of the doubt -- I didn't see it, so I'm going to believe it didn't happen). So.... again, spent another HOUR cleaning up after this whole thing. Glitter, glue, water... all over the carpet.

Lesson: Slime outside is a good kind of slime. I won't be able to do another slime program for months... but that's the fun of the job, right? One door closes, and fifty more open. Except I'm closing the slime door and padlocking it until I'm ready to face the glue and borax again.

BING(Woe)

Reading these bad boys off was a nightmare after round 5.

I was at a loss for a fun program to do this Friday evening, and came up with BINGO (it's easy and cheap... and who doesn't love bingo?). Well, I went to Amazon to order a bingo set because we didn't have one already. A cheap one. Preferably one that I could purchase and wait for reimbursement without starving by next paycheck.

I guess you get what you pay for.

$12.99 and free shipping got me bingo balls that were faded and continued to fade as I picked them out of the cage during the program. I'm irritated, but I should have known better.

Unhappiness aside, the three people who came to my program had a blast. I'll definitely repeat this in the summer when I'm sure people will have more time to attend. And maybe by then I can either fix this bingo set or invest in another? 

Country Dog, City Frog

I was just subjected to the saddest children's book (not THE saddest, but pretty sad). 

Am I just an emotional Librarian? I didn't even read it fully... I was just told how it went and I was sobbing. Who am I? Why am I like this? 

... I'll go back to my reference librarian duties. 

Blinded by Valentines Month

I've only lived through one year of being a librarian during Valentines Day.

It was interesting and successful -- I, of course, did Blind Date With A Book when I lived in South Jersey and turned it into a drawing for a free box of chocolates and two tickets to see a movie in town. While participation was kind of low, I still got many compliments about the work I put into it and my book selections for the display.

I'm in a different library with a different demographic. My strategy needs a lot of work.

These are two photos from last year. My theme played along the lines of the old "Mystery Date" board game. I combined teen and adult titles (without deciphering which was which) and wrote a little bit about the title on the front.

 

 My ideas for this year are more polished. I have a little less room to show off books, and lack in those awesome end-caps from my last job. Plus, the barcodes of each book are now inside rather than outside (no simple cut out in the back for easy checkouts).

I'm definitely sticking to the drawing, as I believe it will make more patrons interested (and who doesn't like free stuff?!). 

I'll definitely update with how it's going and what the final results are.  

If you're a librarian considering this awesome February display, definitely hop over to the Ontarian Librarian's blog post about Blind Date With A Book, along with the first BDWAB post from the previous year.

No Woes with Cupcake Wars

January 12th (Cupcake Wars) was a fun day -- leading up to it, however, took a lot of work!

I first began advertising this program in December on our library's Facebook. Almost instantly I had 28 people interested. As I'm only one person, the thought of 28 people coming to a program was terrifying in every possible way. I took a breath and told myself to worry about it closer to program time.

Plus, these things are better when you take them one step at a time, right? Right.

My first thought was cupcakes. I had no idea how I was going to bake 30+ cupcakes (if that's how many were actually showing up). I am a TERRIBLE cook and baker, so the thought of burning them to a crisp two days before my program was haunting my dreams. Instead, I decided to try to ask for donations. In the town I work, we have a few major grocery/bakery chains. Stop and Shop were by far the nicest and easiest to work with, offering me not only 30 vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, but $10 extra dollars for whatever I needed.

Needless to say, I was thankful and impressed. The extra $10 bought me some extra frosting.

Ingredients strewn across the table.

Next I had to decide what I wanted to include for the challenge. For those who don't know, Cupcake Wars is a challenge where contestants build cupcakes using particular ingredients. The library's version was a little simpler -- it was more about impressing the judges with design than taste (none of my judges were into tasting the cupcakes, anyway).

I wanted to use ingredients I knew they'd wrinkle their noses at, while at the same time not making it too much like a Fear Factor challenge.

The two oddball ingredients were maple syrup and canned cheese. Not popular but it was fun to see their reactions.

After a trip to three stores, I had everything I needed, plus extra left over from other programs.

Table set up at the front of the room for ingredients.

Set up was easy -- my library has a decent sized programming room which gave me the opportunity to have a judges table, an ingredient table, and two tables for kids to work at. I bowled up the ingredients and used spoons so they wouldn't touch the food (spoiler alert: they did it anyway). The icing was bagged individually. Each container of frosting made around five sandwich bags of frosting. This was something I was certainly proud of, considering my mess that was edible slime (I shudder at the thought of scrubbing the carpets). All the kids had to do was cut the tip off and TA-DA, instant piping bag.

The program itself was great. The prep was what took me forever as just a single person. Next time I do an in-depth program such as this, I'm going to need another person. Mental note taken.

(All my worrying was worthless, by the way. 28 people didn't show up. 6 girls did. All of which had zero food allergies. When I have a food program with registration involved (and most of my food programs involve a registration online), I always ask this important question: "Are you allergic to anything?". It's, to me, the most important question. I'd never want to turn a kid away because he couldn't be in the same room as a jar of peanut butter. However, it's super appreciated that a parent not sign up a child with an allergy the day before. I like to prep as best as I can to cater to kids. I called everywhere to find a place that would do a peanut-free cupcake, and nobody could help me out. It wasn't a problem, because as I stated before, everyone was food allergy free, but I had a very annoying moment of anxiety that I'd ruin a kids evening.)

Getting to work on their creations!

ANYWAY, the theme of the program was books, video games, graphic novels, or any materials you can borrow at our library. This was vague, but shockingly all of the kids did very different things. They had 30 minutes to impress the judges. When the first 15 minutes hit, I paused the timer and told them they needed to decorate an extra cupcake which represents the library itself. (If I had 28 kids show up, I wouldn't have done this... but I figured 6 kids in 3 groups ... I sort of needed to get rid of all the cupcakes I had without eating them myself).

The creations were fantastic. My three judges (our Director, the Supervisor of the Children's Department, and one of our Pages) had a really tough time deliberating which they were going to choose. I'd had the kids vote (two votes: one of which could go to themselves) but it was a 3 way tie (go figure).

The group that won got a small cake and a $15 iTunes gift card.

1st place winners: Library by the Beach.

This program costed me almost $100 dollars.

There were little things I could have done to make it cheaper, but I had the budget money and I knew that this would be a hit. You're probably thinking that 6 kids isn't really a hit... but let me tell you, friend, having 6 ecstatic tweens at any of my programs is a HUGE hit. I also don't bring many outside performers into my programming -- if I can do it myself, I will. And I do it as big as I can. Plus, anything extra that I didn't open goes into my programming stock pile.

I'm a low budget librarian working with a big budget. Something I'm not used to.

Anyway, there it is. Cupcake Wars. Not as messy as edible slime (ughhh) but still kinda messy and a while lot of fun.


Thank you to The Show Me Librarian for making a post about their Cupcake Wars program! It was extremely helpful. You can find it here.