Halloween Boo 2018

My library always does a special Halloween storytime on whichever Preschool Storytime day is closest to Halloween. It consists of two parts: storytime, and then a costume parade through the library as the families make their way through trick-or-treat stations. While this is always the formula, the youth services team nominates someone each year to organize and run the program since it has the second-highest attendance of the year (the first is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the SRP kickoff). This year it was my turn!

Facilitating Halloween Boo consists of planning the trick-or-treat stations and leading storytime. For the stations this year, I decided on four: stickers, candy, a take-home craft, and a book. We're lucky enough to have about 100 new Halloween books donated to each branch yearly for this event, so we give those out on a one-per-family basis to make sure there is enough for everyone. Stickers and candy are easy enough to buy in bulk. The take-home craft I chose was a bat headband that consisted of four parts: the bat, the paper headband, self-adhesive googly eyes, and an instruction sheet.

Instruction sheet (made in Canva)

Me modeling the finished product

For the storytime, I ended up alone in front of over 200 attendees because our other librarians were busy with crowd control and making sure the crowded room stayed safe. Luckily our Vice Mayor stopped by to run a trick-or-treat station, and also came up to dance with me during the intro.

Storytime went like this:

Intro: "Hello Hello" and "Open, Shut Them"

Story: Shake Dem Halloween Bones by W. Nikola-Lisa
Before starting the book I taught everyone the refrain so they could chant with me. It was a great way to get 200 people engaged in the story.

Shake, shake, shake dem bones

Shake, shake, shake dem bones

Shake, shake, shake dem bones

At the hip hop Halloween ball!

Also, since our huge program room was full to capacity, I found the Ebook version of this and projected it on the wall behind me. This was much more effective than reading a physical book in front of a crowd that large because everyone could see the pictures.

Movement Songs: "Baby Shark Halloween" and "Ten Little Monsters"
I projected the videos for these songs as we sang and danced. Still effective directed movement, but a little extra excitement for this special day.

After the second movement song, I did my best to get the group organized into a line before they left the program room for the parade. The first trick-or-treat, the sticker, came as they left the room and ventured into the rest of the library.

The Incredible Hulk came to storytime!

So did Iron Man! (This is my friend Muffin and he just keeps getting older)

Regular storytimers in their awesome homemade costumes!

Me with an airplane, a robin bird, and a fairy princess

Me with an airplane and a fairy princess

I'm A Little Bit Famous Again

Tonight our library hosted Harry Potter Book Night, part of a nationwide night of celebration of the series. The program was originally thought up by my youth services partner Sara, and worked on by several members of our staff. We set it up as stations throughout the library, mostly in out collaboration space called THINKspot and the Children's Room.

Stations included "potion" making (tasty juice and soda with food coloring), wand painting, "howler" paper crafts, sorting kids into their houses, and a costume contest. I had limited involvement with a lot of the planning, so I'll let my coworkers report on the specifics on their blogs if they wish. However, I was free and able to travel downtown to the Arizona Midday studio to appear on a segment promoting Harry Potter Book Night to the whole valley. So, I am famous again!

I am not able to embed the video, but it is immortalized forever on the Arizona Midday website.

Watch my segment of Arizona Midday here!

Visiting the TV studio was a surreal experience. The closest thing I've experienced in the past is a recording studio as a kid. Everything was on platforms, which were themselves on wheels, and nothing was as sturdy as it looked.

The studio from my perch in the waiting area

My shooting location with my props on the table

Teleprompter

Me and the host after shooting the segment

This is a video showing how to make the Howler craft. It isn't nearly as complicated as it looks.

This is an example of the wands. Basically, you make a design with hot glue on the fat end of a chopstick and let it dry, then paint over it. 

Also, our local newspaper Nearby News stopped by for the event and ran this short feature on it.

The program itself went great with over 100 people in attendance. Harry Potter is always a slam dunk!

Spooky Singalong

This program was the brainchild of my wonderful and talented partner in crime, the other youth services librarian at my branch, Sara. She conceived, named, and planned this whole thing. Hopefully she will have her own librarian blog soon so that I can link to her entry about Spooky Singalong and give her all the recognition for this incredible event. Until then, here is my take as one of the staff members who helped set up and run it......

First of all, I will not be writing up our actual Halloween storytime and parade because I didn't get enough pictures of our super cute tiny patrons in their costumes, nor did I get permission from any of their parents to share those pictures in a public forum such as a blog. So here is a picture of me, Sara, and our temporary (she is getting a promotion!) third youth services librarian Nicole on Halloween day. I am a unicorn, Sara is a dinosaur, and Nicole is the human embodiment of the spirit of Halloween itself. 

Now, for the Spooky Singalong program. We did a Disney Karaoke program during Summer Reading, which was an awesome success with almost 100 people coming to sing iconic Disney songs and dressing up as their favorite character. So for Halloween, we had a similar program with some troubleshooting that we learned from the Disney event. 

First of all, most of the participants at a weekday program are not yet in kindergarten, so they are not fluent readers. Instead of playing actual karaoke tracks with words on the screen but no vocal track, we played songs with vocals intact. Second, instead of have children sign up to sing one by one (like karaoke in the real world), we structured this program as a storytime/karaoke hybrid and called it a singalong!

The prep for this program was insanely easy. Sara found a great playlist of preschool Halloween songs with animated videos, and we projected it on the wall of our programming space. There were rows of chairs set up, but everyone was encouraged to get up and dance around as we sang. 

In addition to their Halloween costumes, which most of them wore because tomorrow is Halloween, there was a craft station set up where kids could cut out and decorate their very own cardstock "monster feet." Sara printed the templates onto cardstock a couple of days ago, but we did not cut them out ahead of time; manipulating scissors helps develop fine motor skills! (Plus, less craft prep). After the feet were cut out, there were art supplies available to decorate them.

Here is a video that is 30 minutes long, and almost the exact same as the playlist we used. All the music played for the Spooky Singalong were from Super Simple Songs, which I know I've shown on this blog before in my storytime entries. 

One song that we did use for the Spooky Singalong that is not in the compilation above was the Halloween version of Baby Shark. I couldn't not include it in this entry, so here it is separately:

Afternoon of Disguise

This program was so simple to execute, and so popular!

I lovingly stole this idea from the incomparable Jbrary, who (I believe) originally came up with the idea for an Afternoon of Disguise and lay out the whole program beautifully on their blog. I tweaked a few things from the way they did it, but stayed true to the main idea of the program. 

An Afternoon of Disguise is basically a fun opportunity for kids of all ages to create their own costumes and disguises. We had a mask making station, costume pieces, and a large box of scrap fabric to make your own clothes.

To get the costume pieces, I first solicited temporary donations from my coworkers through email. I asked for any dress-up clothes, old clothes or outerwear, costume jewelry, shoes, hats, scarves, or any other miscellany they might have around their houses. I made sure to let them know that they would get them back, but during the program children would be touching, trying on, and possibly manipulating them in unexpected ways, so they shouldn't loan me anything worth any money or sentimental value. One person came through with a trench coat, some scarves and hats, and a box of costume jewelry, but unfortunately the library staff was not really a wealth of dress-up clothes.

Luckily, I have a best friend with three kids and LOTS of dress up clothes. She was kind enough to let me borrow a big lox of mix-and-match costumes including a Harry Potter Hedwig one-piece costume, scarves, skirts, hats, feather boas, a Home Depot apron, and tons more great pieces.

I also funded a few pieces myself from the dollar store: a superhero cape, a couple of pirate pieces, more feather boas, a tiara, and two sets of fairy wings.

At the mask station, I set out a variety of art supplies and colored construction paper. They were free to create their own masks, or trace one of the templates I provided onto construction paper and cut it out. The most popular template was a half-face super hero style mask, for which I also provided hole punches and yarn to secure these to their face, or straws to be attached to the side so they could hold it in front of their face like a masquerade mask. There were also full face templates available. Art supplies included glitter glue, crayons, markers, adhesive jewels, feathers, and stickers, so they could decorate the masks however they liked.

One last donation from a coworker was the giant box of fabric, which ended up being the most popular thing at the program. It was pretty large pieces of fabric that couldn't be used for anything else; spandex, burlap, and other icky-feeling and hard-to-sew fabrics that had been a donation at one time. I set the contents out next to scissors, and let all participants know that while other costume pieces had to stay in the library, they could take home anything they made with the fabric. As you will see in the pictures below, people got crazy creative with the fabric! Everything from tutus to vests were made, and they got to take them home to wear again!

This was another successful Friday afternoon program, with almost 100 people dropping in during the two hour time slot. I will definitely be planning more on Friday afternoons.

Here is a small feature from our local paper Nearby News.

Enjoy these pictures below of the creative and silly costumes created today! (Permission was granted by parents to share pictures of their children online)

Mask making station