Help Yourself ~ Summer Edition

Help Yourself is a passive program station with activities relating to a different theme each month. For more details, see this post.

The smaller gnomes you see are staff members. I used them for gnome bowling in another program.

June's Help Yourself was made up of activities related to our Summer Reading theme, Dig Into Reading. Most of the activities were from the Collaborative Summer Library Program Manual. I used the gnome from CSLP manual, colored and laminated him, posted a clue about where you might find him on the children's floor, and left tickets for participants to tell me where they saw him. He moved 3 times throughout the month and folks had a blast looking for him. I drew one name from correct answers to receive a small prize.
I also filled a gallon jar with odds, ends and soil, and asked kids to write down a list of everything they saw. We offered a small prize to one participant.
I displayed some of the trickster riddles from the manual and gave the kids the opportunity to share a joke they played on someone or had played on them. Lastly, I copied blank oblong bookmarks from the manual so kids could create a personalized bookmark cartouche.

In July, the activities related the National Ice Cream Month. We voted for our favorite flavor (mint chocolate chip), used our imagination to come up with unique and bizarre flavors, looked for the ice cream cone I set down somewhere on our floor (made of paper), and guessed the number of milk-shake slurping straws in the jar. I also put together an interactive display sharing some pretty wacky ice cream related world records from the Guinness World Records website.

Coming up in August, the theme is water. I plan to have the kids help me find my lost beach ball (again paper, so it doesn't become a toy). I also provided paper fish for kids to report their favorite body of water, whether it be the ocean or the bath tub, and I plan to compile the results in a chart. Participants can choose their pirate name, guess the number of pieces of saltwater taffy in a jar, and see if they can guess the water-related item in a blind box.

**UPDATE** 135 people guessed the amount of taffy in the jar and not one of them was right. BUT that's the most attention a single activity has attracted. Perhaps it was summer mayhem, perhaps it was the candy, but either way it was success!

Far and away, the top three most popular activities are:

• any kind of voting
• guessing the quantity of something in a jar
• finding the missing item

I plan to use those elements over and over and over and over...

Board Games Notebook

We have a wonderful collection of board games at our library. Unfortunately, only some of them were being used a few hours each week during a regular table top gaming program. We came up with a way to offer the board games to patrons anytime by creating a board game notebook. It is a basic three-ring binder with a list of all of our board games, as well as pages of descriptions and age guidelines for each game. I copied the game specifics from the box or online and included a picture of each game on its respective page.


We also keep a stats sheet in the front of the binder to keep track of the most used games. Sorry, Guess Who, and Disney Hedbanz seem to be the most popular. Kids and parents look through the notebook and ask a staff member to bring out the game for them to play in the library. There are about 45 games available. After the first few weeks, we decided to exclude the particularly noisy ones, like Hungry Hungry Hippos and Operation.

Here is an example of one of the game pages:

Disney Hedbanz

Play the goofy game where you never know what you are until you start asking questions! Figure out if the cartoon on your head is a person or an object from one of you favorite Disney movies. Be the first player to guess what you are and win!

2 to 6 players

Ages 7+

Includes 74 cartoon cards, 24 Mickey chips, 6 headbands and ears, and hourglass timer


The notebooks gets used a lot and our games are being loved by families instead of wasting away in the back closet.

Help Yourself

Last November, we began a passive programming station for school age children called "Help Yourself." Each month features a different theme and a few activities. A participant also wins a small prize, primarily by random drawing. The prizes are old summer reading incentives and other small items we've accumulated (Our fearless leader even had an old treasure chest to store the prizes in!).
Most of these activities were gleaned from 2 titles in our professional collection: 

DIY Programming and Book Displays by Amanda Moss Struckmeyer & Svetha Hetzler

AND 

The Librarian’s Guide to Passive Programming by Emily T Wichman

Once again, I was able to use supplies we had on hand. I hoped to get an easel, but happily there were already several in the building and I was able to permanently requisition one.  For a raffle box I used an old plastic tub we hadn't yet recycled and decoupaged it. The other items, such as baskets, pencils, paper, etc, were readily available.

November's Help Yourself - the homemade version before our graphics request was completed

• November's theme was thankfulness for books & the library. One activity asked patrons to list reasons they are thankful for the library and staff shared a list of reasons we're grateful for patrons.
• December featured the distrAction jar.
• January was all about fairy tales, including a giant birthday card for Jacob Grimm. He turned 228.
• February was about friendship and love of the page and included a library scavenger hunt as well as Valentine-making for authors.
• March featured weather activities. We flexed our meteorological muscles by estimating how many "clouds"were in a jar (they were cotton balls) - by far our most popular activity with 72 guesses. Patrons were also encouraged to trace their hand prints onto colored paper we provided and leave them to add to a community rainbow.
• April was much less popular with poetry-themed activities, such as writing a poem describing how you spend each hour of your day or writing an acrostic poem using one's name. 
• May celebrates comics and graphic novels with the creation of one's own 3-panel comic and voting on favorite super powers. I plant to chart the results.

January's Help Yourself, with completed raffle box and poster from our Graphics Department.

The sheer quantity of ideas in the 2 books allowed me to plan themes over one year out. June's theme will tie into Summer Reading with ideas borrowed from the SRP Manual. I'm generally able to prepare any needed handouts and supplies a couple months in advance during quiet hours on the desk. You do need space for the station and a display area is quite nice. It's very easy to tie book displays in with each theme. 
All in all, it was a time commitment to read the books and plan, but this soft program now needs my attention just once a month. I have planning documents for each month available to any interested parties and am happy to share. Just comment below!

the distrAction jar

The distrAction jar is a take on boredom jars popularized by SAHMs on Pinterest. I undertook this a project after conversations with my co-worker, Kendra. We have a cool space for preschool children and a nice teen room at our library, but not a lot to tempt the middle grades or "tweens." In an effort to find a way to redirect tweens getting creative while fighting boredom in the library, I created this jar which contains a whole slew of activities, ranging from educational to silly.

The jar was premiered at a monthly passive programming station called "Help Yourself," but more on that later. During one month, the jar sat out and library patrons were encouraged to select a few slips and complete as many as looked interesting to them. Since then, it has lived on one of our public service desks, waiting to be pulled out for the rambunctious and under-supervised.

There are about 70 activities in all. I got ideas from the blogosphere, our old Summer Reading game boards, education.com, and the Washington State Early Learning and Developmental Guidelines. Most of the activities are self directed and contained, requiring nothing more than paper and pencil, but there are a few with supplemental items that can be picked up at our desk.  I only used readily available supplies - no special ordering or additional cost.

During the month the jar sat out, 26 kids ranging in age from 7 to 15 completed 51 activities, and those are just the ones who filled out raffle tickets. More may have participated without filling out a ticket. I was particularly happy with those numbers as the jar was a passive program with no real promotion and premiered in December, which can be a slow time of year for us. Lots else to do in the lives of families.

Here's the list of all 71 tasks, some of which are specific to our library and location. I also have a Word doc of the tasks in their ticket form that I'd be happy to share with interested parties. Just comment below!