We survived another week! Proud of you guys! This week was a little bit of a departure for me, in terms of programming. I actually led a storytime of sorts! It was a disaster, but a very cute one. Okay wait, let me explain a little more. So at Share-a-Rama this year, one of the presenters showed us a way to do a sort of...create your own story/mad libs sort of fairy tale, where you could bring kids up to perform as characters in the story with props that they chose. And it was beyond cute. So I decided to do a version on facebook live. I let the viewers pick the weather for the story (sunny, snowy, or rainy), the hero's occupation (Princess, Superhero, Rogue, or Bard), the hero's weapon (sword, axe, or fart cloud), and the type of villain we would have (a witch, a vampire, or a pirate). Then we jumped into our story, where a brave Bard named Ziggitha faced off against a Vampire named Ezio to rescue her dear friend Atlas. And my actors? My pets! I'm lucky enough to have four very patient dogs who do not mind dress up, and one cat who doesn't realize he's not also a very patient dog who doesn't mind dress up. We dressed them up as characters in the story, and I narrated the tale in the background. It went about as well as one could expect a story involving three dogs and one cat would go, but it was cute, and the viewers seemed to enjoy it! I'll have to do a more detailed post some other day about sewing and building the props for the story (you'd be amazed at what you can do with some cardboard and paint), but for now, you'll just have to watch the video linked below and marvel at my skill. (ha!) We also did another watercolor paint-along. Our patrons still seem to enjoy them, and again, I just really want to push them to be creative and to do things they don't normally do. We're all feeling some type of way right now with the state of the world, and painting is an excellent way to just zen out for a while. So we're going to keep doing these paint-alongs for as long as our patrons want them. This week we did a silhouette of Hogwarts castle against a skyline painted in our house colors. I also discovered that I don't know what owls look like midflight, apparently, and that's okay! I still had fun, which is always what I want to push as the main goal for these. Lastly, I did another Twitch stream over on our channel. It was a continuation of last week's goal: building Crossroads Library within the Sims 4. We got it nearly finished this week, and it actually looks pretty close, if I do say so myself. I can't wait for our patrons to start downloading our building - sure they can't visit in real life right now, but at least their Sims' selves can browse our library!
Per usual, I've got links to everything we did this week. Check them out here: Doggone Cute Storytime Watercolor Paint-Along Crossroads Builds Crossroads (Sims 4)
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I hope everyone is faring well out there. I'm continuing to adjust to this new normal. Ran some programs on facebook live, and also debuted a "Get to Know Us Through Books" series that I'm running over on Instagram and Facebook as well. I'll link to the first post below, but in short, I sent out a survey with thirty book related questions to all of my coworkers. I thought it would be a fun way for our patrons to learn a little more about us, and to also break up some of the stigma about librarian's being boring stuffed shirts. We have unorganized shelves! Not all of us enjoy classics! Etc. Our patrons are having fun with it, and sharing their own answers too. As far as the live programming goes, I hopped on the trend train and did a tutorial on how to make Dalgona, or Whipped, Coffee. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a coffee making technique where you combine instant coffee, sugar, and water, mix it really hard, and then science happens! The result is a fluffy coffee creation that I could eat with a spoon (you have to really like coffee to eat it with a spoon though.) The recipe is simple: it's equal parts (I did two tablespoons each) of instant coffee, hot to boiling water, and sugar (I used splenda, so the mixture turned out a little darker than it's Instagram counterparts.) While you can mix it by hand, I strongly recommend breaking out a hand mixer and knocking it out in three minutes versus twenty. Once it's fluffy, add it to a cup of milk and ice and stir. Our area has like four coffee shops in a five mile radius. We (not just staff but patrons too) have been jonesing for some fancy coffee, so this was a fun alternative. It's still not a white chocolate mocha with two pumps raspberry and an extra shot of espresso but... it'll do for now! I also did another watercolor paint along. Again, I want these to be fun and I want them to be basic. No sketching required, no fancy watercolor sets. Just a brush, some water, and your kid's watercolor palette. We made jellyfish this week, and they turned out pretty cute if I do say so myself. I ALSO started a Twitch channel for our library. Our teens are pretty into gaming, and I'm also into gaming... so this seemed like an excellent way to get them in on our digital programming. This week we played the Sims 4, and I attempted to build our library from memory. I've been in that place nearly every day for the last four years and it was still a struggle! We all had a lot of laughs over it. I was beyond grateful for the input from our viewers, let me tell you. I had low expectations for our first stream, but it actually had a decent turn out, and we had a lot of fun! The idea is to finish it up next week and have it available for patrons to download to their own Sims games at home. Unfortunately I am pretty new to Twitch, and I didn't realize it doesn't automatically record it and post it after a live stream, so we lost the footage from our first stream! But, lesson learned and I am ready for next week. Here are the links for anyone interested: Get to Know Crossroads Through Books, Day One Learn to Make Whipped Coffee Watercolor Paint-Along: Jellyfish Wow. It's been sort of quiet over here. My library had been busy, busy getting caught back up after summer. And then we hired a new employee and needed to get him trained up. Finally, we got the hang out everything and bam: COVID-19. On one hand, this has been a pretty hard experience. Everyone goes into librarianship for different reasons, but I think for a lot of us, one of the reasons is a desire to help out community in the best way that we can. I'm good with computers. I read a lot and like to talk books when I'm asked. I'm a patient teacher. ERGO: Libraries. But with us closed to the public, I was feeling a little lost. How do I help people when they're not in front of me? Here's where the other hand comes in. A coworker and I have been discussing digital programming for a while now, but we had concerns - how would it work, what would our numbers count towards, would our patrons even be in to something like this? I decided to take this time to find out the answers to our concerns - what better time to test digital programming than when our community doesn't have any other option? The minute I got the green light, I hit the ground running. I created a programming calendar for the library, I started creating facebook events, you name it. I'm working from home, so the programming I can offer has been limited to whatever I can make work, but so far whatever I can make work has been pretty successful. And knowing that the majority of our patrons are trapped at home, I wanted to create programming that used items that they would probably have at their own homes. The first week, I taught a "Crayola Calligraphy" course that had fifteen people watching on Facebook live! That may seem small, but for adult programming for us, that's huge! And it was just me teaching some very, very basic calligraphy using a fat crayola marker and some printer paper. I also led a watercolor paint-along class the same week, also on Facebook Live. I feel like adults especially don't take the time to just sit down and paint - part of it's a timing thing, and I think part of it is just an unfortunate side effect of growing up. We don't want to make mistakes. We don't want to get our hands dirty. We don't want to make something that may not be pretty. Everything is new to children, so it's all fun, even if something doesn't turn out quite right. So I marketed it as something that adults could do with their kids watercolor sets. I let them know that no sketching was involved. We were just throwing colors on some card stock and drawing some trees. And it turned out great! I had people message us afterwards, telling us it was exactly what they needed right now. It was a really validating feeling, knowing that I could still help our patrons even if I couldn't be hands on with them the way that I normally can. Here are the links to the two videos: Crayola Calligraphy Watercolor Paint-Along Working with committees means new experiences and sometimes it means learning new technology - our co-chair asked us to create a short flipgrid video about the books we'd written booktalks for. It was pretty user friendly, and an excellent way to compile some reader's advisories into little playlists. (But oh man - trying to talk about books as amazing as these two in just one minute each? Beyond challenging.)
To check out not only my videos, but everyone else too - head over to the Georgia Peach Book Award Flipgrid!
Let me preface this post with a few warnings: don't do this program during the summer, and pick either the Eggo or the Demogorgon. Or prebake the Eggo so that the only thing your teens have to do is paint it. It's a pretty labor intensive program - we made it work and our final products turned out great, but it could have gone so much more smoothly than it did. And I made a note of it in the instructions, but the demogorgon in the sample image was created before I wrote out the tutorial: don't individually sculpt your teeth. Honestly they have so many teeth and the teeth are so tiny that it looks significantly better to just dot the teeth on at the end.
The tutorials on this one are missing the instructions on creating your Eggo mold. I had the molds premade for the craft, and the instructions are written out for the teens. I believe there's a video tutorial floating around youtube, but honestly the mold is fairly easy to make. Roll out some polymer clay and use a utensil to create a grid in the clay. Bake it and voila: your mold is made.
For May's Fandom Craft Night, we created bookmarks based off of Toothless and Light Fury from the How to Train Your Dragon books and movies series. We used the tutorial above as a guide, so shout out to the creator for such a fun and easy craft. This was a pretty fun program, and it just requires scissors, black markers, craft paper, and some glue. I pre-cut the amount of craft paper that they would need so that there wasn't any waste. If you have sandwich bags you can also presort what they'll need and turn it into a passive program. Most people have some form of glue and scissors at home, so this is a craft that travels well.
The written tutorial is for both the Toothless and Light Fury bookmarks, and it also includes stencils for horn/head/paw/tail shapes.
This Fandom Craft is really going to depend on what your demographic looks like. If it's mostly tweens, they probably aren't watching Sabrina, and if you're in a rural area, definitely don't market this as a spell. Which, it's not anyway. This is an herb sachet. There are two different recipes for what you can include in your sachet: one to ward off negativity, and the other two help you fall asleep. The sleepy time recipe was definitely the popular one with our teens. Probably because it smelled so good. The instructions and recipes are all in the document for you to use and modify as you see fit.
I apologize for the weird filter on the sample image - the original picture came out with extremely warm tones, so I had to balance it out a little bit. This was a great craft to do for Halloween - we got to celebrate our favorite classic horror baddies. This is also a craft that you can modify if you need to. It would be easy to add pin backs to them instead of key chains, for instance. Or do the Creature from the Black Lagoon instead of Freddy Kreuger. (Sorry, there's not a stencil for the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the instructional file. It's only the three villains featured here.) The little details that need to be cut out, like the eyes and the mouth area on Freddy, make this a craft more suited to middle and older teens. Tweens are obviously more than capable, but you may need to help them for the sake of time.
This is a semi-difficult craft. If you have the time, pre-build the boxes so that all the teens need to do is cut out the foam and decorate. It sounds simple but frankly they'll probably need the time. Also, Fortnite is a popular game that also has some form of loot box to open - I don't have a tutorial on how to create one, but it's an option if you're trying to think of video game based fandoms.
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