GreenBeanTeenQueen

Well, I finally have time to sit down and type up all my thoughts about LibraryCon Year 2, or as I lovingly called it, Revenge of the Con!!! LibraryCon 2015 was such a huge success we knew we had to repeat it.  (You can check my posts about our first year here: Part One , Part Two , Part Three) Yet even with that success (400+ in attendance, great feedback from attendees and participants), we realized after the fact that we forgot all about marketing and promoting the Library itself. We figured people would walk into the Library, but with nothing to draw them there and with the entire event being held in our main concourse and meeting rooms, no one actually entered the Library. So the first item up on our planning agenda was to figure out how to promote ourselves. The first suggestion was for us to have a table ourselves. We collected various swag from conferences (with multiple staff attending ALA Annual, we were able to talk to comic publishers there and pick up lots of pos...

Today I'm at the ALSC Blog talking about why Pokemon Go and libraries are a perfect partnership. Come check it out!

Fandom Starts Early Storytime Number 1 Fandom Starts Early Storytime Number 2 I've hosted two Fandom Starts Early Geeky Storytimes for kids and I knew it would be the perfect fit for LibraryCon. My previous Fandom storytimes have been OK, but I held them on Friday evenings, which are always a tough time to draw a crowd. Plus, I didn't get the true geeky families I was hoping for and I knew my audience at LibraryCon would appreciate and love a storytime based on fandoms. I took some things that I've used before and added a few new things for the LibraryCon version. I actually had to adapt and change my plan at the last minute because my crowd ended up being much younger than I anticipated. So here's what we did for Fandom Starts Early LibraryCon! (flying like superheroes) Opening Song: Hedwig's Theme -I opened the doors had the kids walk in to Hedwig's Theme and welcomed everyone to Fandom Starts Early Storytime. I told the parents that it's fun ...

This is part of a three part series about the LibraryCon program we hosted at my library. Be sure to check out: LibraryCon-Part 1-The Planning LibraryCon-Part 1-The Big Event And check out Valerie's post about LibraryCon! Many cool people who helped make LibraryCon awesome! (photo credit: E.M. Ervin So there were many, many things that went wonderfully at LibraryCon and we pulled off an amazingly fantastic event. I'm so proud of all the work that everyone did and what a fun program it turned out to be. Here's what worked well: -Involve the local geek community.   We reached out to so many organizations, cosplay groups, gaming groups, authors, illustrators, and other area cons to create our booths. In turn, those groups gave us names of others to include. This worked well because it helped us find people who really wanted to be part of this event. - Provide water! And food if possible. We provided lots (over 100!) bottles of water for the people st...

Since LibraryCon was such a huge event, I've split these posts up into three parts. Find Part One-Planning here and stay tuned for Part Three-What I'd Do Differently ! And check out Valerie's post about LibraryCon! After lots of meetings, prep, and planning, LibraryCon was finally here! (photo credit: Valerie) On Friday, we set up the concourse and meeting rooms with our tables and labeled everything so everyone could find where they were assigned. I also set up for my Fandom Starts Early Geeky Storytime. We started LibraryCon with a Friday night screening of a local webseries, Drifter . They screened some episodes from Season 1 and then hosted a Q and A with some of the cast and creative team. We had a small but very interested turnout (we had around 30 people attend for this event). We weren't sure if it was the timing, the day, or having two days worth of events, but the people that came loved it. Valerie and I didn't know if we would have a smal...

I've been wanting to host a huge fan convention at the Library for awhile now and I knew it could be done! Many years ago I hosted a Mini-Anime Con for the teens and it was a great event and our Cosplay prom was always huge, so I knew we had an audience ready for an event like this. When I hired Valerie as the Teen Librarian , I knew she would make an excellent LibraryCon partner in crime and so our first annual LibraryCon was born! (Here's myself and Valerie, all smiles and ready for an epic day!) photo credit: Valerie The planning: Planning for this event started many, many months in advance. We are very lucky that our branch manager is a huge comic fan and fellow geek, so we had great support. The three of us met and had several brainstorming meetings of who to invite and we made a field trip over to our local comic book store to talk to the owner about local artists we should include. Valerie also made a trek to another area con that happens in the winter to scout...

So the Meet the Music Hero was pretty much born from this book and Angie's post about doing a program around this book. I had read it and loved it and knew I had to include in this series. Plus, Melba was born and lived in Kansas City as a child, so I loved that there was a local connection to our state! We started this program with going over some background info, talking about jazz and how girls didn't often play jazz. I talked about how picture book biographies are amazing because you can learn about people you never knew about! I told the kids that I hadn't known about Melba until I read this book and I'm glad I learned about her because her story is wonderful. Then we read Little Melba and her Big Trombone by Kathryn Russel-Brown. We also got to make a week to week connection with this book and the previous week because Melba played with Charlie Parker! Then we watched a video of Melba playing her trombone. I loved it when we could show a video of our ...

For our third week of Meet the Music Hero, I wanted to introduce the kids to jazz. I first fell in love with jazz when I was around 8-years-old, so I thought this would be the perfect time to introduce this style of music to kids. Plus, Charlie Parker has some Missouri ties (he was born and lived in Kansas City) and there are many great picture books about these two, so Miss Pamela and I thought it would be a great storytime. We started by dancing to some jazzy music and moving around the room. Then Miss Pamela gave some background about Charlie and Dizzy, what instruments they played, and how Kansas City was a place for jazz. She showed pictures of each musician to the kids as well and had them try to puff out their cheeks like Dizzy. Then it was storytime. We used the book Bird and Diz by Ed Young . After reading the book, we had the kids watch some videos of Charlie and Dizzy playing music.  First up, a video of both of them playing (it was actually hard to find a...

For the Meet the Music Hero program that Miss Pamela and I did this summer, I wanted to make sure we highlighted musicians that were known and some that weren't as well known. I also wanted to include a diverse group of musicians. For week two, we chose Tito Puente. I started with some basic facts about Tito Puente, told the kids about the instruments and music he played, and then read the fantastic picture book biography, Tito Puente Mambo King by Monica Brown.  Unlike our previous week's hero Mozart, I could show video clips featuring Tito Puente! He appeared on Sesame Street, so I used those to introduce his music. I had some older kids who rolled their eyes a bit (Sesame Street-that's a baby show!) but the younger kids loved it! I was also able to show a clip of Tito Puente performing live, which the kids loved. I even had them get up and try dancing the mambo along with the video! I then passed out some rhythm sticks and used good old Hap Palmer...

So one Sunday afternoon I was working with Miss Pamela and I came across this fantastic blog post from Angie about her Meet the Music program . It got me thinking about programs and since were in the middle of planning for our Summer Reading Program, I immediately thought of a Meet the Music and Art Hero program. I asked Miss Pamela if she wanted to team up-she has more of an art background and I have a music background-and our program was born. We decided to host a program on musicians once a week during the month of June (we dedicated July to artists). I went through picture book biographies and chose titles I thought would be good for storytime or to build a program around. This did limit us a bit, since I was looking for shorter books and I was working with ages 4-8 for the program. But you could adapt this program for any age and use longer books if you wanted. The first week, we kicked things off with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We started the program by giving the kids ...

Over Spring Break, we had a full week of programming ranging from storytime to a Lego-Build-Along . Since Ms. A was hosting a Cinderella programming for the tweens the week after Spring Break, I wanted to make sure I had something fairy tale themed for the younger kids who might have wanted to attend the tween program but couldn't because they were too young. I've also been wanting to do a big fairy tale party for a long time, so I thought this would be perfect timing. I hosted the Fairy Tale Bash on Friday night at 7pm. It was a busy day and the weather was rainy and yucky, so combined with the theme, I thought I'd get a large turnout. Surprisingly, I only ended up with six kids, so I ended up not using the songs I had planned because they were content to read all the books-yay! But even with the low turnout, we still had a blast and I have plenty of stuff to recycle for next time! I sadly didn't remember to take many pictures until the room was getting taken down....

Today I'm over at the ALSC Blog sharing about my library's Dinovember display. Here's a sneak peek: Photo Credit: Valerie Bogert

I love to sing and dance so it's no surprise that Bibliobop is one of my favorite library programs! Play music and sing and dance with kids for about 45 minutes? Sign me up! Previously I've used a bunch of CDs and changed them out with each song but finally  I have a speaker and an iPad to use for this program, so I felt pretty high tech with my most recent Bibliobop! (Ha! It doesn't take much!) Although I originally advertised Bibliobop for ages 2-6, it's really open  to all ages and in the Fall I'm changing the description to say infants-age 6. I usually end up with babies and toddler anyway and really, why not include them? They can dance too! The set up for Bibliobop is pretty simple. I have a display of music themed books and I have all my items I need up front. I put out a few chairs for the adults in the back (but I encourage them to dance too!) and I clear the floor. I always read a book to start and take a book break in the middle of dancing (mostly bec...

If you work with kids, you know what a phenomenon Frozen has become. So when I realized that I would be without a summer reading performer during the last week of our Summer Reading Program, I knew I had to plan something. Every Thursday at 1:00, we have a big performance (usually a hired performer but sometimes in house programs as well) and I knew that once our patrons got into the habit of coming to the library every Thursday during the summer, I couldn't skip the last week of July.  I decided to go with a Frozen Sing-A-Long since the movie was thankfully covered in our movie licensing at the library. I didn't really have many ideas of what to do exactly except sing to the songs in the movie while it played. But luckily my amazing friend Angie also hosted a sing-a-long and gave me a lot of great ideas. Since the program was planned after our programming booklet was published, we only advertised this event via fliers, word of mouth, and on the library website. I ...

Me and my teen librarian J cosplaying as books. So I may have been ALA Left Behind this past weekend, but at least I got to have fun at the library with our fifth annual library prom! The themes over the years have changed ( Moonlight Masquerade , Geek Prom , Zombie Prom , Nerd Prom-which apparently I never posted about!) This year, my teen librarian J came up with the idea for Cosplay Prom. It was a huge hit and the most popular prom we've done so far! Setting up the Event:  J actually did the setting up and we brainstormed ideas of what to put out to keep the teens entertained in case they didn't want to dance (which is always a possibility). He bought food supplies to make candy sushi and we also had some animal crackers out for a snack. We didn't provide drinks because it's messy and we have a cafe in the library that many teens purchase drinks from anyway, so we decided food was enough. For activities we had easy origami owls , paper bowtie making, pi...

Can you name all of The Hobbit characters? I am a big geek and one of the things that I love about working in the library is that I get to work with people who share my love for geeky pop culture-both staff and patrons. I've been wanting to do a geeky storytime for awhile and finally hosted one a couple of weeks ago. Here's what I did: To help set the mood, I had the kids walk into Hedwig’s Theme Opening Song: Clap Your Hands by They Might Be Giants Book : Star Wars ABC-I had the kids help out and call out the characters they knew when they came across them. They knew most of them and I had quite a few Star Wars fans in the group which made this book fun. Song : Soft Kitty-when I announced this song, I got a big laugh from the parents in the room Soft kitty, Warm kitty, Little ball of fur. Happy kitty, Sleepy kitty, Purr, purr, purr. Book : Robot Zombie Frankenstein by Annette Simon Song : Robot Parade by They Might Be Giants...