Text and Java

  New directions, my friends! Here is the what: I have had a transitional period in which I was promoted (officially a librarian, yay!) and have been given a new branch to cover-in addition to the programs I am already doing at my original branch. Hoo-Ah! As of now, this blog will be less about book reviews and more about programming (which was always really the point around here anyway, just look through the archives for anything tagged crafts or programs). The new reality? The budget that  was always kind of thin is now crazy skinny so the focus will be on entertaining up to 30 kids for very little money. The goal: to make kids love the library more than they did before! I present to you my "Lights Out Craft"! Of course, I forgot to grab an SD Card on my way out the door, so I have very few photos, but here goes. I had a big group: about 24 showed with an average age of 9. Some little bros and sis's from the crowd rounded out the group. I gave each child a ...

Cruise Into Crafts! For my 6-12 year olds I hosted Cruise Into Crafts in which we boarded a "cruise ship" called the SS Librartania and went to sea. On deck, we had a phantom boat story (not too scary) and stations of fun. The ship went down the East Coast to South America, so Station One was a craft of molas. We made ours from construction paper. I think they look all 3-D and cool. Station Two, the kids made "Find Its" from empty creamer bottles (the clear ones) and colored rice. I searched for doodads all around the library for days beforehand, and we had more than enough shells, buttons, tiny toys, and wooden pieces to hide in there. Really cute! Station Three was Limbo. We had trophies for the winner of each group. Station Four was shuffleboard. The TBC painted a shuffleboard on paper for me, I glued two of those smaller cheap Frisbees together (with some glass marbles inside for weight) and made "pushers" from gift wrap tubes and paper plates. Statio...

So, I know it is late in the summer, but I want to share some of the stuff my crew has been up to (busy, busy bees). First, they picked The Maze Runner by Dashner as our August book. I think it is great that 15 kids all share the same reading preferences. With our One World, Many Stories theme in the kids room, we created a "communication corner". See our lovely English phone box? It was once a refrigerator box, but I cut the many windows and created a "dome" by gluing on poster board. The TBC painted and decorated the booth. We placed toy phones all around the box and on the tables and the little guys have just loved "calling" the world fr om the library this summer. Here is a close up of the inside. Also, written inside is "hello" in many different languages.

Today was our glorious Mockinjay Party! The Teen Book Club and I celebrated the release of this season's MOST anticipated book with style! Here's what we did: We had an icebreaker of creating new Hunger Games names for ourselves, an idea I borrowed from the foreverya blog. See it here . Then we picked September's title: Lord of the Flies Then we ate: bread and berries of course (well, we went soft pretzels for bread and strawberries and blueberries for berries) Then I set up three stations, borrowing heavily from the post here which led me to my trivia question center, the poison berry identification center, and then I set up the Wii and had them play sword fight Showdown (in which one swings and "kills" a bunch of people who are attacking you) on Wii Resort. Finally, we played the excellent Cornucopia C hallenge. The lucky winner took home a copy of the book (a side note: I stopped at Sam's at 8am this morning and they did not have the book out, then I trie...