Fortune Tellers

This month's passive program in the Teen area of the library is reading-focused.  I'm totally on board any time we can tie a program or activity in with our collection and encourage people to read and/or check out books because in the end, the library's collection is one of my highest priorities.

Do you remember Fortune Tellers?  Or perhaps you knew them better as Cootie Catchers?  These folded pieces of paper had the mystical power to answer all of your deepest childhood questions.  Did Jimmy have a crush on you?  Should you wear your blue shirt to Jenny's birthday party?  Would you mom mind if you ate a few more cookies?  Just make a few easy choices, open and close the Fortune Teller appropriately, and BAM!  A virtually instant answer from the universe, offering guidance and wisdom during troubling times.

I decided to take this trope and use it as a way to help bored teens pick their next read.  Teens can pick up a Fortune Teller (I made three different ones to pick from), make their choices, and then find out exactly which genre of book they are destined to try today.  If they don't like the answer that the Fortune Teller gives them (because hey, sometimes the universe gets it wrong), they of course are more than welcome to try again.

I put the Fortune Tellers on top of one of our book displays, along with a selection of books that fell into some of these genres.  Amazingly enough, with 24 different book fortunes, some of which are as broad as, "Read a book by a female author," literally anything at all from the collection goes.  Sneaky, right?  I used this as an opportunity to display books that are under-circulated and that need a little extra help getting into people's hands.

There is absolutely no way to track how many people are using the Fortune Tellers, but I'm really okay with that.  In a halfhearted attempt at more concrete usage-tracking I did put out a few slips of paper that people could fill out telling me what their fortune was and which book they selected, but I honestly don't really expect the teens to bother with this without further motivation.  I have been keeping an eye on display and have seen that the fortune tellers have moved a bit and that some of the books on the display have been checked out, so I suspect that it's seeing at least a little traffic.

In the interest of full disclosure:  I did not come up with this idea all on my own.  I found an image on Pinterest that used this idea.  However, I am unable to link to the original source as it has since been taken down or moved, and my saved link on Pinterest is no longer valid.  So big thanks to whoever it was that originally came up with the idea!

Maze

We've started doing passive programming in the children's area of my library quite recently, and the month of March was my turn to create one of these programs.  Here's what I came up with:

I found this maze* online just by Googling "mazes" and looking at the image results.  I tried to pick a maze that had bold lines.  It couldn't be too hard (I didn't want younger kids to be discouraged), but I didn't want it to be too hard but not too easy either (didn't want it too boring for older kids).  The image size also had to be fairly large so that it would print crisply after enlarging it.

I used Microsoft Publisher to blow the image up to poster size and added the start and finish words/arrows.  When it was ready, the maze was printed on nine sheets of tabloid-size paper.  I assembled the maze, trimmed the margins as needed, and mounted it on several more sheets of red construction paper.

Once the maze was created and assembled I just hung it up on the wall.  Kids who came by could just use their eyes or a finger to find their way through the maze.  Easy!

To track participation, I also posted a sign asking them to come to us at the Children's Desk when they finished so that they could get a marble to add to the jar on the shelf nearby (not pictured).  It's amazing how well this actually worked.  Only a handful of known participants failed to come up for their marble (we'd add a marble ourselves if we noticed), and some of the younger kids were surprisingly excited about adding a marble to the jar.  At the end of the month I just counted the number of marbles in the jar to get a number to include with our program statistics.

I would absolutely call this program a success.  We had 92 marbles in the jar at the end of the month, which is a fantastic number.   What I especially liked was that this maze was a quick thing to do - most kids only needed a minute or two to find their way to the end - but it was still lots of fun.  To me, that's the perfect recipe for successful passive programming.



*I may or may not have violated some sort of copyright law by using the image of the maze in this way.  Honestly, I am never quite sure what qualifies as "fair use" and what qualifies as infringement, so I decided to just go with the best image I could find.  Judge all you like.  And if you're the creator if this maze and you're mad that I used it, please know that I'm very sorry and intended no harm.  And if anyone wants to better explain how "fair use" does/does not work, I'm all ears.

Pi Day Display

Pi is a pretty magical number.  For those of you who haven't taken a math class recently and/or do not use pi on a regular basis, pi is a number that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  Pi is always the same number no matter the size of the circle.  It is a never-ending, non-repeating, very very very long number, usually truncated down to two decimal places:  3.14.

Math geeks in recent years have taken to celebrating Pi Day on March 14 since the date, when written out with numbers, uses the first three numbers found in Pi.  This year's Pi Day was extra special because when we included the year along with the month and date, we could expand Pi by two additional decimal places (3.1415).  Neat!

To celebrate, I did a little display all about Pi in the teen area of the library.  I found lovely printables online and mounted them on construction paper, pinning them to the bulletin boards on our shelves' endcaps. One of these was a super cool infographic with some neat facts about pi.  The other was a printout of pi's digits in much of its glory.

I also wanted to add an interactive element to this display, but didn't want to put out math worksheets because a) we're not a school, and I'm not a math teacher, and b) that's not exactly super exciting or attention-grabbing.  Instead I found a Pi-themed crossword puzzle and put them in a folder for teens to take.  Since voting has been a popular passive program for us, and since eating pie is one of the more popular methods of celebration on Pi Day, I also asked the teens to vote for their favorite kind of pie.  (For the curious, apple pie was the clear winner with 20 votes.)

A Big Number

This month in the children's department we are doing a Valentine's Day passive program.  We have a big jar of conversation hears on display, and we've challenged everyone to guess how many are in the jar.  It's all quite charming, and that big jar of candy has been a real attention-grabber.

Today a group of our regulars (two kids, age 5, and their nanny) came in and noticed the jar.  The nanny tried to get her kids to take a guess.  This activity is naturally a bit of a challenging for younger kids who do not yet possess refined estimation skills.  The nanny knew this, and really just tried to get the kids to guess a really big number.  The first child's guess?  One million.

The conversation with the second child is what really cracked me up:

"How many hearts do you think are in the jar?  Think of a really big number."

"Infinity!"

This lead to a brief, but very nice conversation about how infinity is never ending and there was definitely not a never-ending number of conversation hearts in the jar.  The kids seemed to accept this restriction on their guesses and the conversation continued.

"So let's guess again.  Think of a really big number that isn't infinity."

"Ten!"

From one extreme to the other.  Well done, kid.

Doodles

During the months of December and January, our passive program in the teen area was very simple.  I put out some quarter sheets of colored paper and asked the teens to draw something.  They were then invited to pin their drawings up on the bulletin boards.

In two months time, we had 21 doodles posted up on the bulletin board.  Not bad considering how slow of a month December usually is in Library Land.  It was also really interesting to see what kinds of things the teen choose to draw.  Subjects ranged from flowers to fan art to winter scenes to animals.  The artistic rendering ranged from super basic to very detailed.  But since it's all anonymous, there was (I hope) no real pressure for anyone to do anything in particular - which is in my mind one of the major appeals of this activity.

What Are You Thankful For?

November's teen passive program drew its inspiration directly from one of my favorite holidays:  Thanksgiving.  Bad news:  I neglected to take a picture of the display before taking it down.  You're stuck listening to me describe it instead.

Setting up this passive program was super easy.  I made a large sign on 17x11" paper with the question, "What are you thankful for?" written on it.  Then I put out some quarter sheets of colored paper and pens.  The teens could write their answers out and post them to the bulletin board.  Easy!

Most of the answers were very nice.

A few were a little bit more...interesting.

Teenagers:  Gotta love them!

I've also learned that when asking the teens to write something simple like this, a smaller piece of paper is best.  Even these quarter sheets were too large since the answers were so brief.  Next time I might use Post-Its, or perhaps cut these quarter sheets in half.

Teen Polls

For some time now I have been interested in trying different forms of passive programming in the teen area of the library.  Passive programming is great for library staff because it is (generally) much less time-consuming than traditional programming.  It's also great because your audience doesn't need to attend an event at a specific time to participate.  Staff just puts out the supplies needed and library patrons can do the activity whenever they are able to visit the library.  Everybody wins!  

During the month of October, I borrowed an idea that I had seen ages ago (so long ago that I can no longer site the article) in an issue of VOYA and put up three polls in the teen area.  The questions and the options that the teens had to choose from were each posted on a large 11" x 17" sheet of paper.  I also posted an envelope with stickers inside.  To vote, teens simply needed to take a sticker and stick it in the appropriate area to indicate their choice.  Easy!

I posted three questions in total, all of which were book-themed.  Click on the images below to get a closer look at my set-up and to better view the questions.

I wasn't sure what kind of response these polls would get, but we actually had a very good turnout for this passive program.  The number of votes for each poll ranged from 26-38 depending on the question - fantastic for one month's time if you ask me.  I could never get those kinds of numbers doing traditional "arrive at this time and do this activity" programs.  Even better, little things like this will help to give the teens a chance to express their opinions and get them engaged.

With the success of October's polls, I'm planning to roll out a new passive program each month during the school year in this area.  The specific activity will change from month to month.  Stay tuned for more!

Underground Engineering Activity

During the summer we set up an activity table in the children's area.  We feature a different activity to try each week, and kids who complete the activity are rewarded with an extra raffle ticket for a chance at one of the big summer reading prizes.  This week our featured activity is a hands-on building project using PVC pipes.

We took PVC pipes, cut them into manageable pieces, and sanded the edges.  We put the pipes into a bin with some connector pieces and asked the kids to put the pipes together to design a plumbing system.  As a way of counting participation in this passive program, we also asked the kids to draw a picture showing us the system they designed, which they could turn in to us in exchange for a raffle ticket.  The kids have really enjoyed this engineering activity.  Some of them would truly spend hours building with the pipes if they could.

Best Reads of 2011 - As Voted by Teens

During Teen Read Week we had a passive program taking place in the Young Adult area. We set up a raffle for teens to enter during this week. Two winners would be selected and would win a book of their choice off of my prize cart. All they had to do was tell me what the best book that they read this year was and why it was so good.

I had a secret ulterior motive with this program - I just wanted to get an idea of what my teens were reading! It was also nice to offer at least one program that brought the focus of Teen Read Week back to reading.

My teens really impressed me with some very thoughtful responses to the "why did you like this book" question. Here are just a few of the books mentioned in this year's raffle entries:

Across the Universe by Beth Revis
Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen
Flygirl by Sherrie L. Smith
13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Pies and Prejudice by Heather Vogel Frederick

For the purposes of this raffle I did not require that the book be published in 2011, though I did ask that teens list a book that they read for the first time during this year.

Hidden Landmarks

When it comes to special summer activities at the library, I come from a long and proud tradition of the, "find-this-picture/object/stuffed-animal-at-your-library" game. The idea is simple: Take an object. Any object will do, but it's more fun if it goes along with the summer's theme. Hide it somewhere in the library - not tucked away somewhere where you can't see it, but someplace where you have to be paying attention to notice it. Invite kids to search for this object. Change the hiding place periodically to keep things interesting (I like once each week, but I once worked at a library that came up with a new hiding spot every day). It's a fun activity especially for kids age 8 and younger who come to the library often - the hunt is one exciting things at the library that's always changing. Best of all, it requires relatively little staff effort.

To go along with this year's theme (One World, Many Stories), I decided to hide pictures of famous world landmarks. Many of the landmarks were easily recognizable even to very young children, like the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China. Others were a little more obscure. I came up with a fun fact about each landmark, posted along with the photo, for extra educational bang.



Each week the kids could check in at one of the large bulletin boards in the children's area to see which landmark was hidden this week. The bulletin board also featured a large map of the world (I printed my large 57"x76" map in sheets from this website, and it worked great). As each landmark was hidden, I would add a dot to the map indicating where in the world it came from.



I don't give the kids any sort of prize other than my sincere congratulations when they find the hidden picture. I did, however, once work at a library that gave away stickers to successful searchers.