Hey there everyone is libraryland. Well, good news. I got a job! I am now a Youth and Teen Services Librarian at the Chelsea District Library. It's a big change from being a stay-at-home mom and I miss my boy terribly, but I love being back at work. There's a great programing culture at this library. And though, like all public libraries, the budget has suffered a lot of cuts lately, the program budget here is still WAY bigger than it was at my last library. So I've got big plans.

Ok, it's been a while so I owe it to you to tell you where I've been. I do a lot of rock climbing,I'm learning Spanish, and I've started getting back into chess. Oh, and I've started my first garden this summer. All of this, plus the baby raising of course, has left me less time to blog. But that's not to say I haven't thought about you. I have a whole back log of ideas in my head that are just waiting to be blog entries, so stay tuned.
The most recent idea came from my family reunion. Did you know that you can make ice cream by pouring milk, cream, and flavoring into a 1 quart zip lock bag, then putting that bag (sealed) into a one gallon zip lock bag filled with ice and rock salt. Then just mash and shake the two bags together for about 10 minutes. Open the bag, insert spoon, and enjoy.
The great thing about this is that each child can make their own. You can have a variety of flavorings, sprinkles, cookies crumbles, and chopped up candy bars for the kids to choose from. You may want to provide gloves or suggest that they bring their own since the bags can become very cold to handle, but overall, this could be an awesome summer program.

Ok, I'm a sucker for toy givaways. Follow this blog and be entered to win Melissa and Doug food for your library (or for you.) This is a homeshchooling blog. If you have a large homeschooling community using your library, this blog can be a good resource to see what issues and subjects are the most important to the homeschooling patron base to help you provide the best collection for this demographic.
Mama to 4 Blessings - Our Homeschool Blog: GUMMY LUMP (MELISSA & DOUG) PLAY FOODS REVIEW & GIVEAWAY 2 PLAY SETS UP TO $50.00!: "Links to this post"

Today I read a friend's blog entry about how a fellow library patron chased her into the parking lot to reprimand her for not reshelving the books her toddler had taken off the shelves. She actually felt quite bad about it. She wrote, “I know...libraries are places of quiet where books are treated as objects of reverence...But, if you've ever dealt with an almost 19-month-old, you realize that getting them to comply is sometimes easier said than done. ” I was happy to inform her that librarians actually prefer that patrons leave books on the tables or shelving cart for library employees to reshelve. Not only is it good customer service but it also prevents books from getting lost by being misshelved by well meaning patrons.

A few months ago I did some grant research with another women and we had pulled quite a few books from the shelf. When we decided to call it quits for the day I picked up half the stack and brought it to the shelving cart . She picked up the other half and dashed into the stacks trying to reshelve the books as fast as she could so she could get home on time. It took her a lot to convince her it was OK to leave the books on the shelving cart, even after reminding her that I am a librarian and explaining to her the reasons I mentioned above and adding that it helps give the librarians an idea of which reference books are being utilized. Finally, after it took a while to reshelve only a couple of books, she conceded, but instead of placing the books on the cart she brought them to the librarian with a shamed apology and an explanation about how she had to get home and didn't have time to reshelve the books. She, like my friend, felt terrible about it.

In fact, a lot of patrons seem to have difficulty with this. I feel like as a librarian, I was often approaching patrons who were hastily reshelving books and telling them it was OK to leave the books on the table or shelving cart and that's it is, in fact, preferable that they do so. So many times patrons would put their books on the table and look at me uncomfortably like I was trying to get them into trouble. It just feels so unnatural for people to leave “a mess”, especially in a place that they have been raised to treat as a place of reverence. But to my friend with the 19-month-old, my grant research partner, and all my past and future library patrons, I PROMISE you, it's OK. Librarians are not going to think that you are a bad person if you don't reshelve your library books. Now I wish I could track down that man who chased my friend out of the library and explain that to him.

Ghost Hunters...not just for October. Paranormal investigators are always a popular program for all ages or teen events. There are several paranormal societies in Michigan so you can easily find one near your library. Most paranormal societies will give presentations for free or for a small donation. If the society that you contact doesn't have a presentation ready you can always ask them to do a presentation on one specific aspect of ghost hunting such as EVP's, orbs, cold spots, etc. to make an interesting presentation. You can also ask them to lead an investigation of your library. I have contacted a few paranormal societies that would love to do library programs:

Grimstone Inc. out of Carlton, MI is one of the longest continually running paranormal research organizations in the Midwest and has experience providing educational courses at area schools. You can contact them by email at investigators@grimstone-inc.com or by phone at number is (313)444-GRIM and check out their online newsletters at http://www.grimstone-inc.com/News/GrimstoneGazetteWin2011.pdf.

The Metro Paranormal Investigations (MPI) is enthusiastic about working with libraries. They are willing to travel and don't charge for their presentaions. They told me they have a fun presentation unlike any other team out there that they have presented to several local schools, libraries, and community groups. You can contact them at 810-853-8573 with any questions or to book them for your library.

South Lyon Area Paranormal Society (SLAPS) also has experience giving library presentation and loves educating the public about paranormal investigations. They can be contacted at [email protected].

Name brand Silly Bandz are 10 or 10 at Kroger right now, which got me thinking...Silly Bandz Party for upper elementary and tweens. For a cheap in-house Silly Bandz program, have the kids win Silly Bandz by playing Silly Bandz themed games, and do a Silly Bandz themed craft. A few games and crafts I came up with are:

• Have the kids shoot the Silly Bandz at a target on the floor and see who is closest, or have them shoot at a bucket to see who can get the most inside the bucket. Each team can have their own color so you know whose is whose.

• Have a Silly Bandz team race where one person has to run around the room looking for their team's color Silly Bandz and then bring it back and put it on the wrist of the team member waiting at home base. The team whose home base person has the most Silly Bandz around their wrist when time runs out, wins.
• Put Silly Bandz around someone's wrist or around a paper towel roll and see who can figure out what shape the Bandz are.
• Make homemade Silly Bandz with silicone sealant and food coloring
• Put out a jar and guess how many Silly Bandz are in the jar.
• Make rubber band bouncing balls out of regular colored rubber bands.
• Make Silly Bandz necklaces and braclets by linking Silly Bandz together.
  

Elizabeth Lange Cannella, author of There's a Monster in My Lunch Box and There's a Monster in My Classroom, gives her “Imagination Presentation” to spotlight reading and creative writing for children. She will read a copy of her own book, as well as focus on other local authors and some well-know classic authors - everything from Devin Scillian to Dr. Seuss . This program can be modified to be geared toward K-3^rd grade or 4-5^th grade. The author's fee is $50 if she is allowed to sell her books at the event and $75 if not. Elizabeth Lange Cannella can be contacted at: ph. #248- 935-5496 or email [email protected]

For more information about the author you can visit her site: http://www.elcbooks.com

I want to give a special congratulations to the Westland Library. Being a youth services librarian and a mother of a toddler, I have become a connoisseur of library story times over the past few years and I was particularly impressed by the Westland Library's Toddler Time. There were several activities during the story time that enabled the kids to get up and move around, keeping them actively engaged throughout the whole session. One activity involved giving each child a small sticker and letting them place it on a printed drawing of a bridge. The older children had fun choosing whether to put the sticker above or below the bridge, while the younger children, like mine, were just excited to put a sticker on something. A pack of stickers and a sheet of copy paper....genius. I did something similar with velcro sets at my library, but I only had about five sets and each set had a limited number of pieces. If I was still doing story times, I would steal this activity.

The story time wasn't the only thing that impressed me about the Westland Library. While my son was placing his sticker, I was talking to a father of another tot. He was telling me how a librarian told him he didn't need to pay for a membership and about all the different resources the library had to offer. 'So', he said, 'I got a card and after story time we're going to check out some books and dvd's'. Be still my heart! A convert! This library really takes advantage of the fact that library programs get new people in the door and uses it to actively reach out to potential patrons. After story time my son and I wandered out to the children's area and sure enough, a librarian asked me if I had been to the Westland Library before, if I lived in Westland, welcomed me to the library, and made sure I didn't leave without a program schedule in my hand. Now that's how it's done.

Congratulations, Westland Public Library. You win the first Chatty Librarian award. Let's call it....hmmm. A Chattski! Good job, Westland.

I saw some nice jumbo floor puzzles in the bargain section of Borders for $5.99. I didn't see any that were in theme with the Summer Reading Program, but floor puzzles were always a bit hit at my story times.

Professional Belly Dancer Dalia is available to do both family oriented performances and children and teen workshops. She is able to discuss the culture, costumes, dance moves, and music of the specific regions such as Tunis, Egypt, "Bollywood", etc. or to give a general performance depending on your programs needs. Her asking price is $300. She can be contacted at: [email protected] or you can contact me for more information.

I was thinking about how young children rarely receive mail and how fun it is for them to receive a letter of their very own. If I still had a library, I would love to have a program where children who register for the program would receive a personal letter from me. One idea is to send a letter for book related achievements such as reading a book out loud to their parents or reading a certain number of books. For time and simplicities sake I would choose only one of these ideas for the program, not combine them. I think a personal letter would be a great way to establish a connection with the children and their families. I would let the children know that they are always welcome to stop by the desk and say "hi" and to let the librarian know if they have any questions or book suggestions for the library. It might help to make the library seem less like an unapproachable institution and more like a place where they have a voice,and hopefully some of that will stick as they get older. This type of program may be too time consuming to run continuously so I would have a certain time frame for parents to register and/or for the children to complete their tasks such as a small Winter Reading Program.

I've been meaning to post this one for so long that I think it falls under the category of old news, but the engagement of Price William and Princess-to-Be Kate provides us with all sorts of programming opportunities. You can host a real princess tea party for the kids, or, since William and Kate are both young, rich, hip, and famous, this could be your chance to pull off a more upscale royal engagement party for the teens. If you think it's been too long since the announcement, you could always start planning ahead for the wedding. Has anyone had a Royal Wedding themed event yet?

I just noticed that the Discovery Kids digital cameras are on Black Friday sale at Kohl's for $25 (usually $79). My last Summer Reading Program we gave one of these away for the final prize in the baby through preschool reading group (and I paid a heck of a lot more than 25 bucks). If your up at 3a.m. this Friday, keep in mind those big ticket Summer Reading Program prizes and maybe you can stretch that budget a little bit more. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I've been waiting to hear back from some performers, so in the mean time here's another in-house program idea. This is one I used at my library every December. I would buy a bunch of cheap plain gift bags of varying sizes, then I would go into my craft cabinet and pull out scissors, glue, crayons, markers, paints, glitter, stamps, stickers, scrap paper, ribbon, cotton balls, googly eyes, and whatever else I could find. Then I let the children and their parents create their own personalized gift bags. This is a great program because it's for all ages and it's seasonal without being devoted to any particular holiday. And of coarse the best part, it's CHEAP!

Since libraries all over the country are doing the themes "One World, Many Stories" and "You Are Here" I thought it might be within the theme to have the kids/teens connect with other kids/teens in other parts of the country. You could have a program where the kids make a scrapbook or 'zine' about their city by bringing in photos, letters, poems, urban legends, and stories about their hometown. Then trade copies of your publication with other libraries in other states. Librarians all over the country are looking for cheap programing so you could use a listserv such as PUBLIB or PUBYAC to find a least one who would be interested in trading scrapbooks. You can then keep the scrapbooks of the other cities on display over the coarse of the Summer Reading Program. Thoughts?

Children's author Lynn Baldwin would like promote her latest picture book, "Wally One-Sock", by giving free readings and signings at Detroit area libraries. Though she will do the readings for free, she does ask that she be allowed to sell the book to those who wish to buy a signed copy. For information on the book, "Wally One-Sock" go to: http://www.wallyonesock.blogspot.com/. The book can also be found on Amazon.com.

Lynn can be contacted at: baldwinl [at] prodigy.net

It may be late in the season for this one but you can always put in your pocket for next year. I would love to do an apple tasting program where I buy a few of several different type of apples and cut up slices so people can try and compare the different kinds. Depending on what age group this program is designed for it can be accompanied by apple themed games, songs, and stories.

This would be a great 2011 SRP program for both teens and adults. For those of you who don't know, geocaching is a treasure hunt using GPS units. The treasure, or cache, could be anything from small trinkets to special locations. How it usually works is, someone hides a cache and then places the coordinates on the geocaching website: www.geocaching.com. The cache often includes a notebook for those who find it to leave their name, the date, and anything else they would like to say. Sometimes the cache has a theme so hunters can take one trinket from the cache and leave another. For example when I went on a hunt with a toy theme, I left a Mickey Mouse Pez Dispenser and took a small toy airplane. There are hundreds of thousands of caches all over the world.
Oh the program possibilities.
1. You could plant your own cache somewhere on the library grounds and take a group of teens around looking for the hidden treasure.
2. You could have a program out of making a cache and hiding it, for example have the teens make something or bring something to put in a box, work together to decide on a location, find the coordinates for that location, then submit the coordinates to geocaching.com.
3. You could send out a "travel bug" with your library's name and email address on it. A "travel bug" is a trinket people leave at a cache. When the "travel bug" is found the finder goes to geocaching.com to register when and where they found it, then they hide it at another cache for someone else to find. If you follow the bug's progress online you can see it travel all over the world. The problem with this is that the bug may travel very slowly and might not make it very far during the duration of the Summer Reading Program.
4. You could give out coordinates at the library and let people with their own GPS units to find the "treasure" on their own. If you do this you could direct them toward historically or otherwise significant areas of your city or direct them to a local business that agreess to give out a prize if the patron tells them they found the location using the coordinates from the library.

I think the geocaching website is worth checking out. It certainly fits the theme and other than getting a hold of a GPS the programs can be practically free.

This may be an obvious one. I'm not sure if this one has come up already, but how awesome would this be as a teen or tween program? And cheap. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Minute to Win It is a TV game show where contestants have one minute to complete ridiculous challenges such as stacking paper cups and keeping three balloons up in the air. All the challenges are done with regular household items so the game itself is pretty much free. You probably have most of the supplies in your craft storage closet. The only thing you may need to put money into would be the prize, and that could be anything...an ipod nano, a five dollar gift card, the glorious feeling that you've won...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDwh1UbB5qA

Ahhh fall is creeping in. It's a beautiful time of year when a librarian's thoughts turn toward next year's Summer Reading Program. I caught wind that next year's theme is travel. This should be a fun one. It's funny how you can start planing in October and still be scrambling to get it all together before school lets out. Oh, I miss the scrambling....but then again, no I don't. So now I've been adding travel themed programs to my mental list of kid's and teen programing. Since I don't have a library right now, I think it's time I start sharing this list with the Youth Services Librarian world. Maybe someone else can benefit from my brain always being in program planing mode.

Hello World,
My name is Robin and up until recently I was a youth and teen services librarian. I left my job at the library about a year ago to stay at home with my one-year-old son. I love being a stay- at-home mom, but my inner librarian just won't keep silent. I can't turn off the part of my brain that sees something interesting and says "oh, that would make a great library program." So here you are librarians, a blog full of all the program ideas I would be doing if I still had a library. Please feel free to comment or add your own ideas. Thanks for reading.