We did it! We finished another school year of library visits and tours! Lessons were learned, improvements were made, and tons of kids, teachers, and parents visited our main library and our branch library for tours and outreach. I previously wrote up the process of how we do tours for our K-2 visits and people have…
In a way, this event exemplifies everything I think these one day stand-alone programs can be: no matter what you might see, you don’t have to spend a TON of money and endless staff hours creating something that looks like it came out of a party planning book. You don’t have to limit attendance just…
One of the questions I see come up most often online is “how do you do library tours?” And I understand why because I struggled with this too. How did we make classes visiting our library an actually productive experience instead of just come check-box for teachers to kill an hour? I did a lot of…
Like many of you, I want to provide the homeschoolers in my community with programming relevant and interesting to them. Many homeschoolers are heavy library users so it made sense to design a program for them. Anyway, we’re always looking for more school year programs for school age kids so why not use this demographic?…
One of my co-workers called this “the perfect library program” and I have to agree! It’s also SUPER SIMPLE and BASICALLY FREE and has a huge age range appeal. What’s not to love!? We opened a new branch library after years and years of planning. (My library system only has two locations – our larger main location…
I was brainstorming for summer reading when I came up with this program. A lot of the inspiration came from What Color is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors by Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Raymond Obstefeld. This book traces the history of several African American inventors who are not widely known. As I was thinking…
Welcome to Thrive Thursday for February the month of love. It’s a perfect month for me to host, because I LOVE THIS ROUND-UP and I love this community! There’s TONS of great content this month, so let’s get going! Mallory has a BRAND-NEW blog (aw yes new bloggers, welcome and keep writing!) and she wrote this…
Last January, I first heard about libraries hosting Noon Year’s Eve parties for kids on New Year’s Eve, celebrating the new year at NOON instead of midnight. My only regret was that I was going to have to wait a whole year to have the event at my library. I like to have at least…
Summer is already in swing at my library. We are having great return numbers on our reading logs, we had a HUGE crowd for our kick-off show (easily over 300 people), and even our regular programs have had an attendance surge. We launched our Lego Club to FANTASTIC numbers of almost all boys aged 7-14…
The key to unlocking American Girl was understanding that I had to understand the material AND that I should let the material guide me and guide the program. And not just the material as in American Girl but the material as in the specific girl I’d chosen: Rebecca. In reading the Rebecca books (I’m speaking here of…
