YAAS: Pumpkin Decorating

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+ where we do community service work, library programs, host guest presenters, and make connections with peers in a safe and welcoming environment.

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

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:

Pumpkin Mosaic Art

Since it's October, I hosted a drop-in craft for all ages with the theme of pumpkins. Living in Arizona, it's sometimes hard to remember which season it is by looking outside, because it stays in the 90's well into November and then suddenly drops to the mid-50's until Spring. So, we overcompensate for our lack of weather with extra decorations.

This is the example I made of a mosaic pumpkin. This is a fun art project that you can easily tailor to any age group, which was lucky for me because I had a family with a baby and a preschooler, a set of three pre-teen siblings, and lots in between.

Making a pumpkin mosaic includes four basic steps:
1. Paint a piece of white paper your desired pumpkin color (fun to mix paints and create a custom shade). Wait for it to dry. We had Halloween and Autumn coloring sheets to work on while we waited.
2. Cut your custom painted paper into strips, then cut the strips into triangles, rectangles, and squares.
3. Fit your new shapes onto a construction paper pumpkin and glue them down.
4. Decorate with googly eyes and a Jack-o-Lantern smile!

This project is great for motor skill development because of the painting and cutting with scissors, and also helpful in developing spacial awareness by fitting the pieces together on the pumpkin.

I thought I got some pictures of our awesome final products, but I can't find them now! So instead, here is a .gif of a librarian (and/or model) wearing a dress I wish I owned in front of a photo backdrop I wish I owned, and my promise to be better at taking pictures of adorable children's art in the future.

Mad Science: Halloween Candy Float/Sink and Dissolving Pumpkins

Happy Halloween and happy Mad Science day! Since it's getting close to Halloween, we did two candy-centric experiments in Mad Science today.

When the kids walked into the room, I had it split in half using dividers. On one side of the room there were tables set up with four cups per station, and four candy corn pumpkins in front of the cups. These stations also included a pencil and a half-sheet worksheet that I made (click to see larger image):

After all the kids came in and got settled, I poured a small amount of each liquid into each of their four cups: vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, canola oil, and rubbing alcohol. After everyone had all their liquids, I let them (gently!) drop one pumpkin into each cup.

We talked about what we saw happening right away. Some of the pumpkins were bubbling slightly. Others had turned on their side. Still others had a small amount of their coloring floating off of them already. I asked the kids to make their predictions based on what was already happening to the candy. They all thought the rubbing alcohol pumpkins would dissolve completely in half an hour, but weren't sure about the rest of the liquids.

At this point, we moved to the other half of the room. It was set up with clear tubs filled about halfway with water, a new half-sheet worksheet (click to see larger image), and a selection of wrapped Fun Size candy on the tables. After they chose their stations in the new part of the room, I explained that we would be doing a float/sink experiment while we waited for our pumpkins to change. 

I talked for a brief moment about density. I don't like to do very intense science lessons in this program, but it is nice to give them some vocabulary words and write them on the board so they know what they're seeing while it's happening. We learned that if something is more dense, it sinks, and if it's less dense, it floats. We talked about what can make an item less dense, like having air pockets or being hollow even if it is solid (a good segue into talking about the Three Musketeers candy later... MillenniaLibrarian thinks ahead :p). 

As a group, we predicted whether we thought the Fun Size Starburst candy would float or sink in the water. I had them circle their prediction, and also took a vote and wrote how many of our group members thought the candy would float vs. sink. We had some food allergies in the group, so it was up to each child whether they would unwrap their candy or not. 

When I tried this experiment earlier today, all the candies sunk except the Three Musketeers, which floats because of their air pockets in its filling. However, I was experimenting with all the candies unwrapped. When I heard a shriek halfway through testing the Starburst, I thought someone had splashed water on themselves. They were actually shrieking from pure delight because their wrapped candy was floating, while their neighbor's unwrapped one had sunk! It didn't even occur to me to try them both wrapped and unwrapped. 

As a group, we figured out that when they were unwrapped, every candy except the Three Musketeers sinks, but all of them float when they are still in the wrapper. The kids decided this must be because of the air trapped inside the sealed plastic wrappers. I love that this happened, because they taught me something I hadn't even considered when planning this experiment. 

After our amazing density discoveries, we came back to our pumpkin cups to judge their progress and fill our our other worksheets. I wasn't able to get any pictures of our experiment, but here is one from the website I lovingly stole the idea for the experiment from, Lemon Lime Adventures:

Source: Lemon Lime Adventures

This is what the pumpkins in the rubbing alcohol and peroxide looked like. I left a few in for another half hour after the program, and they dissolved completely. The oil completely preserved the candy. The vinegar softened it, but did not totally dissolve it in the time allotted.

In the experiment example I followed, the pumpkins were fished out of their liquids and copied in drawings. For my program, we left the pumpkins in, but did draw them after their time in the cups and observe how they changed.

Source: Lemon Lime Adventures

I believe my Halloween candy experiments were a hit with all the 6-12-year-olds who came to my program today. I have to admit that Mad Science isn't my favorite program to run because of the science aspect (I am a humanities girl all the way), and how structured it needs to be in order to work as an hour program. However, the kiddos always have a good time. I will leave you with this cute conversation I had with a third grader after the program.

Kid: Are you a science teacher?
Me: Today I am.
Kid: What about the other days?
Me: I'm a librarian.
Kid: What does that mean?
Me: It means I'm an everything teacher!
Kid: And you give books too?
Me: Yeah, I give books too. 

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