Audiofile Review: The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan Read by Stephanie Hsu

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Audiofile Review: The Player King by Avi, Read by John Keating

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Overdue

I haven't added to this for a while because I was busy moving states, finding a new library position and all of those other life things. Two exciting life things that have happened are reviewing for Audiofile magazine and speaking at the ALA Annual conference. Maybe some people will be led here from my business cards from the conference? If so, hi! Nice to see you again.
I was invited to be a part of a panel at ALA Annual in New Orleans sharing my LEGO robotics program I created at New Haven Free Public Library. This program was very dear to my heart and I love sharing it with people. We hired and trained 4 teens to teach LEGO robotics to kids around the city.
I have decided to start linking to my Audiofile reviews as they're published. I have wanted to be an Audiofile reviewer for many years, having worked over 12 years in audiobook publishing with a theater education and then earning my MLS. I began in January and am writing two a month, generally in the mystery/thriller adult genre, children's chapter books, YA, and biography/memoirs. It's been fun to try new audiobooks and find a way to squeeze my opinionated self into 125 words or less.
I will go back at some point and add more program details for my past programs. I'll also try to keep up with my new library programs.
Thanks for checking me out.

Extended LEGO Club with Maker Fun

The Standard
The library had an extremely popular weekly LEGO Club for kids 5 to 12 (we have extra large building bricks in the children's room out all the time for younger kids). There was a large assortment of regular pieces, boards, minifigures, and a ton of random little accessories. People might tell you that you should steer away from sets and kits and stick to the plain pieces, but it's not true. The kids love the little flames, swords, flowers, and all kinds of bits that they use to create mini kingdoms and scenes. My supervisor use to go to a LEGO store that had a fill-a-bag section and would just add all kinds of things. As our minifigures walked out over the course of the years I was there (especially the female minifigures), I budgeted in two sets from LEGO Education- this community set and a fantasy one. I found these sets to be the best price for the largest number of figures. I also added a bunch of 10X10 plates, the kids liked to add them together to expand and we had a limited number, these I just got from Amazon. When the kids came in they'd choose their plates and minifigures, which were carefully rationed before we got the new sets. Then they'd find a spot around a table set with gladware bowls full of regular pieces and large plates heaped with accessories, for easier digging. Anything in a bowl or plate is fair game, if it's on the table in front of someone it's  been spoken for and you have to ask if they will trade. At the end we put each child's creation in our lighted display case for the week with a post-it or card with their name on it. They love showing their parents and friends throughout the week.

With very few exceptions, I didn't set themes or parameters for the kids, they all had different interests and things they wanted to build and I felt it was important for them to have some unrestrained creative time. This social media ad shows a couple incredible dynamic scenes the kids came up with one week:

I sometimes had teen volunteers help me with LEGO club and while it was under my main umbrella focus, part time employees tended to run it most of the time after I'd been there a few months. A few hours before the program time I'd take the creations out of the display and take them apart, separating out the regular pieces from the accessories and the minifigures. I once took apart a small constructed box in a scene, when I opened it there was a disembodied minifigure head with a small red single cap piece on the neck, I have no idea which kid made it, but it's one of my top ten LEGO club memories. 

Extended Version

When LEGO club falls during a school vacation or an early dismissal we would extend it to two hours and add some maker activities. LEGOs were still the most popular by far but we managed to get some to expand. Here are some of the other stations:

LEGO Catapults-

These were my first addition. I will admit I held the minifigures hostage to encourage the kids to try something new, if you wanted a guy you had to at least try to make it fly. There were to approaches to making them, one was a simple lever on an wheely base, and the other involved small rubber bands and was a bit harder to make work. I covered a table in paper to let us track and measure their efforts. 

Geodesic Building

This one became extremely popular and a regular fixture of Extended LEGO club. I added it because kids + snacks is a no-brainer. It's pretty simple: edible joints connect toothpicks to make pyramids, towers, and domes. The first time I used hard gummy pumpkins, because it was Thanksgiving. These worked well but were heavy and not very tasty. We also used grapes, which worked the best and healthy, but were expensive. We tried cheese sticks broken up into cubes, they didn't work at all, they got too soft too quickly. In the end, our tried and true choice was mini marshmallows. They're very cheap and work perfectly. Each child gets a plate, a pile of toothpicks (around 25), and about a 1/3 cup of marshmallows. They're welcome to eat their building materials, but they have to build at least one thing first. 

k'nex

Someone donated a huge box of these next-level building toys to the library. We set them out and just let the kids do whatever they want. They're a bit harder to put together than LEGOs and take some more patience. They like that they can make creations that move and we also have two motors that take a lot of trial-and-error to make work but are popular too. 

Tech Make Night with iPads

I've had a number of programs for kids 5 to tweens using iPad apps for making. Most of the programs I've used are free. I usually had one app that I was demo-ing and pointing out to them  but I let them play with other apps as well. I'd help them out when needed but encouraged them to try to figure out as much as they could. I didn't pressure them to create a finished product. I've always felt that what most kids (and people in general) want is to make themselves heard, to tell their stories. I truly feel that tablet apps can offer them new tools to create their own worlds and share them. 

 

GarageBand- 

This app comes with the iPad. Don't be afraid to introduce kids to this powerful app, there are lots of smart functions that allow for messing around without having to understand all of the mixing functions. When you add an instrument to your mix there are a number of options to spin through, the ones with gears around them offer small pre-made loops that are easy to put together. There are a lot of YouTube tutorials you can watch but messing around yourself for half an hour or so will show you a lot. I like to suggest kids start with the smart drums, it's very easy to understand and lets you layer a lot of instruments together with immediate impact. Your instruments come from the specific drum kit you choose. Then you just drag the icons over to the grid, farther to the left is a simpler beat, towards the top is loud, and vice versa. When you have the combination you like best, just hit the record button to add it to your song. 

Kids also love recording their own voices and playing with these different filters-

The kids never really came up with finished songs, but the beauty of open-ended maker programs in the library is it lets them play around and explore without any expectations. 

Puppet Pals 2

This is a very silly app. It uses simple drag and drop and record functions to let kids make their own little animations, similar to the JibJab videos from a few years ago, with 2-d images that break apart at the mouth to talk. They have a lot of educational historical figures as well as archetypes like ballerinas or cowboys. They also let you make your own characters using photos or drawings. The kids I've seen really run with this one, coming back month after month to keep using the same iPad and building on their gallery, have used this function. They draw their own backgrounds and come up with elaborate skits. I've seen kids as young as 6 and as old as 11 have a ball with it. 

Stop-Motion Movie Making

I have a background in independent film, so I really liked being able to give some film tools to kids. I've used a few different apps over the years, they all generally work the same way. It can take some time for kids to start to see their work turning into an actual film, but I've seen a lot of kids stick with it. I would put out LEGO guys, boards, and a small assortment of accessories, as well as our misc. felt board toys that have been orphaned from their original sets. I also opened up the storytime closets to let them use other stuffed toys, rubber ducks, etc... Here are a few of my favorite kid flicks from programs: 

That last one, the pool, is my favorite, it's so creative and embraces all of the opportunities offered by the minifigures. It truly blows me away.  All of these were made in a single 60 minute session. 

You can take these creations to the next level by combining garageband and stop motion films with iMovie, making your own soundtracks, effects and cutting together longer projects. This would work best for older kids but I would say kids as young as 7 or 8 could manage it as well. Like Garageband, iMovie comes with the iPad and is close to a professional-level app, but you can easily pick up a few functions to start making simple films. 

April Showers Bring ZAP!

I was able to bring in a wonderful STEM educator from a local private school for a special program on electricity. While trying to come up with an interesting electricity program for Benjamin Franklin's birthday in January I found a number of experiments using a large static-electricity producing machine called the Van de Graaf generator. You might have played with one at a science museum or in science class. I looked around to see if I could rent one or have an organization bring one to the library for a modest price. By putting out my search at a staff meeting I found out that a local private school that one of our branch manager's kids attended had one. Even better, the STEM educator there had a relationship with our library. She was happy to spend her Saturday sharing her school's resources with our kids. It ended up taking us a while to arrange the program and I ended up holding it in April.

She brought all of her own materials for experiments with the generator and two additional experiments. One simply involved wires, batteries, and small lightbulbs, encouraging the children to experiment with circuits.

We had several parents and kids try out the generator with hair-raising results. Fine, light hair reacts most visibly, so be aware that not everyone will end up with their hair sticking up. But you still feel the current through your body. The teacher was well versed on the safety measures and made sure everyone practiced them, there were no injuries. She just used a regular outlet for the generator.

This program had some of my favorite elements: free, STEM, and bringing an unusual experience to the library. It was also very light on using library resources, including supplies and my time for planning/set-up.

Cardboard Play Structures

I'm a big fan of Mr. McGroovy's box rivets, they let you make all different sizes of cardboard creations without needing all giant appliance boxes. I think the biggest of any of the boxes below was 2ft x 4ft. The rivets are reusable, though I'd say about 60% of the ones I try to pull apart do so without breaking. Still, a single $20 box of them has gotten us through 4 different builds.  I use a sharpish phillips-head screwdriver to make the holes in the boxes for the rivets. I find it makes the most secure structures if you use multiple layers of cardboard. The first  build with our set was a gingerbread house that my supervisor made. Next I created a Magic Tree House for a program to mark the author's birthday. I wanted to get some height so I stacked up a number of pallets I found in the basement, including a handy plywood platform that made it so kids wouldn't fall through the slats. That ended up being played in and loved for about three months. The tree was something a coworker had made as a thankful tree for thanksgiving. During my program the kids made "boards" and leaves to decorate it.

At some point the roof caved in and I took it off, I was suddenly deluged with dozens of concerned  kids begging me not to take it down. Instead we decided to just keep going and I made this pirate ship. I know, it looks a bit like a tugboat, but the flag and figurehead made by our ace artist library assistant help sell it. This was also very popular but the pallets it's on were incredibly noisy, since we only had one platform and the pallets were more spread out there was a combination of individual planking and cardboard flooring to make it safer. I added some heavy duty cardboard tubes leftover from Muggle Quidditch to give the top some extra support and there's a box acting a little like a chimney in the back to further support the roof. Having something to go inside was clearly very important to them with the tree house so I needed to maintain that.  

Once the pirate ship started getting worn out my coworker requested a fire truck. We decided to scale down with it and go to just one pallet. We uncovered some old foamcore displays and used a few pieces to make flooring. Since the firetruck is smaller only small children can stand on that part and falling through the pallet slats is alleviated by the foamcore. The pièce de résistance was an old plastic tray from some long ago platter that I cut a hole in the middle of and used a rivet to attach it a small box to act as a real spinning steering wheel for the firetruck. We ended up painting the firetruck red in a program and I have to say it really didn't help it. I've heard latex paint used for interior walls is really the best to use on cardboard. We used tempera and it just ended up very transparent and kind of rusty looking. It also dampened the cardboard a lot, cutting down on the clean lines. I moved on from this position before creating another structure, I hope someone else picked up the torch because the kids really loved playing in them.