Activities Checklist
One thing that I had noticed at last year's program was that while we had lots of kids come into our main programming room to do our craft projects, many of the kids weren't visiting the Children's Room to look at the Star Wars book display. This was a problem for me because in my mind, the book display was the main reason for having this event in the first place! To encourage the kids to come into the Children's Room I did two things: First, I put a few quieter activities in the Children's room to lure them in. I also created a checklist of all of the activities (including checking out books!) that kids could try. Kids who tried at least three activities could also drop off their checklists and be entered into a raffle for some Star Wars books. This system seemed to work out really well. Kids wandered around the library looking for different activities to try, and we had a lot more books get checked out compared to last year.
Fortune Wookies
A Fortune Wookie was featured in Tom Angelberger's third Origami Yoda book, The Secret of the Fortune Wookie. This piece of origami is perhaps better known to most of us as a cootie catcher or fortune teller and in this case is styled to resemble the character Chewbacca. Angelberger provides a printable template with instructions that kids can use to create their own Fortune Wookies. I put these out along with some scissors and let the kids go to town.
Star Wars Stick Puppets
I found a PDF full of cute Star Wars printables here. (Note: When you follow this link, please scroll down to find the links to download the printables. Don't use the big green "download here" button at the top of the page! That's an add for something else entirely.) One of my favorite activities, which I found in the first pack, was a set of printable, stylized Star Wars characters. These characters could be cut out and then glued onto a craft stick to make an instant puppet. I had been looking for another craft that would be preschool-friendly, and this project was a perfect fit since the puppets are very simple to make. I also set up a table and wrapped it with a "skirt" (actually a couple of big black garbage bags) and encouraged kids to use the area as a stage and put on puppet shows once they were finished. It took a little bit of prodding to get most of the kids to use the puppet stage, but once they warmed up to the idea it worked wonderfully. It was super cute, and I like that it encouraged a bit of imaginative play and storytelling.
Star Wars Memory
Do you know how the game of Memory works? Cards are laid face-down in a grid on a table. Players take turns flipping over two of the cards. If the cards match, then you get to keep the cards and take another turn. If the cards do not match, then you flip the cards face-down again and it's the next person's turn. Play continues until all cards are matched up, and the player with the most matches wins.
The pack of Star Wars printables that I mentioned earlier also contained the printouts needed for the Memory game. Just print the sheets on cardstock and cut them apart to make your deck. If you wanted to you could laminate the cards to make them extra durable, but I chose to skip this step and didn't have any problems. Since I made two sets of cards, I put a different colored sticker on the back of each set to make things easier for me when they inevitably got mixed up. I just put the cards out on the tables along with some basic instructions and let families go to town. One thing that I especially liked about this activity was the way it got kids and parents to really interact with each other, rather than the parents just watching their kids have fun.
Star Wars Word Search
I wanted one more simple activity so I created a word search using this website. There are lots of free online tools like this, but the thing that I especially liked about this one was that the "words" that I wanted to kids to search for could include spaces, allowing me to have the kids search for full character names like "Darth Vader" and "Han Solo." I just came up with the words that I wanted included in the puzzle, plugged them into the website, and had it generate the word search for me. I coppied their generated search onto a Publisher document and then added a few images, a heading, and of course the library's name. Once I settled on this particular puzzle maker it took me all of about 10 minutes to create the word search. Easy!
As always, Star Wars Reads Day was a great success. Our total attendance was actually down slightly from last year, a fact that I attribute to the days' unseasonably warm and sunny weather. Even if the numbers were down, however, we still had a solid turnout and the kids who did attend all had a great time.
No comments:
Post a Comment