YAAS: National Pet Day

If you want to learn about the original conception and mission of this program, read my What is YAAS? post. TL;DR: It's a weekly group for youth age 14-24 where we'll be doing community service work, library programs, hosting guest presenters, and making connections with peers in a safe and welcoming environment.

National Pet Day is on April 11th every year. I started celebrating it at the library so I could have a standing program every April, but it's turned out to be a major hit. Last year's event even had a visit from our Vice Mayor!

The main idea of this holiday is to make sure our pets have great lives. I like to take it a step further by taking time to acknowledge all the homeless pets-to-be out there looking for their forever home. Our group made tug toys out of fleece to donate to a local animal shelter, and had a visit from a City of Mesa Animal Control officer and her adorable rescue puppy! 

This video shows the basic instructions for making a toy, but you can braid or twist it any way you want as long as it's nice and tight so it takes aggressive puppies a long time to chew all the way through. Using the same technique as a summer camp lanyard works very well, as does braiding for younger kiddos. It also turns out that chewing on fleece is good for a dog's teeth! 

 

Build Your Own Musical Instrument

This program was absolute insanity, in a good way! Our program participation numbers have been off the charts so far this summer; we've been capping it at 250 and still turning people away at the door. Today was an especially big deal because we had two fantastic musical programs back-to-back.

The first one, organized and facilitated by my wonderful programming partner Sara, was the local string trio Triad, who performed a concert for an audience of over 200 people of all ages in a program we called Kids Music Lab. Not only did they perform a bunch of kids' hits (songs from Frozen, Moana, and The Greatest Showman among others), they also gave talks about their instruments, how they became musicians, and how they formed their group. I think it was especially inspirational to the kids in the audience who play instruments at school, because all three women made a point to mention they all got their start playing instruments through the Mesa Public School System's music programs.

Here are a few blurry shots of their performance from my circa-2005 digital camera that's probably close to a dramatic technological death.

Top hats for The Greatest Showman medley 

Shark hats for the Jaws theme and other movie themes medley

After Triad was finished with their performance, we brought out tables of craft supplies that had been pre-set just out of reach of the patrons. On each table was a different "build your own musical instrument" craft, each made of household items.

Here are the signs I put on each table, so people could mingle and craft at their leisure. Below is a list of all supplies you would need for each craft. By the end of the hour, we were almost completely cleaned out of supplies and I saw some very happy kiddos leaving with their new instruments!

• Paper Plate Tambourine
• Paper plates (not styrofoam)
• Hole puncher
• Ribbon
• Jungle bells
• Decoration materials
• Craft Stick Harmonica
• Tongue depressors
• Index cards
• Rubber bands
• Decoration materials
• Tissue Box Guitar
• Empty tissue boxes
• Thick rubber bands
• Decoration materials
• Textured noisemakers
• Pool noodles
• Plastic knives
• (I pre-cut the noisemakers to length, but let kids and their caregivers cut them in half themselves with plastic knives. There were no cuts or other safety issues, yay!)
• TP Roll Kazoo
• Toilet paper rolls
• Wax paper
• Rubber bands
• Decoration materials