Amy Holcomb

Last month we shared a program for grades 3-5 at Skokie Public Library inspired by a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago about visualizing animals. This month we extended our inspiration and with the same grade range, focused on learning about animal specimens. Here’s what we did. We provided a brief slide presentation like the previous program to provide a foundation of knowledge before moving on to the hands on portion. The presentation defined “specimen” and provided photographs of various types of specimen, like life mounts, wet prep and pinned insects. We had a small group and they were all [...]

After a fall visit to the Field Museum, my colleague and I were inspired to share knowledge from the museum's extensive Specimens exhibit. We were particularly struck by the information about the Tully Monster, a prehistoric water animal whose fossils are abundantly found in Illinois, not too far from Skokie Public Library. We decided to focus on two main concepts for a Be the Scientist Program for grades 3-5: what are fossils and how do scientists determine what animals look like from them. Here’s what we did. We began the program with a brief slide presentation with background information about fossils. [...]

As we’ve posted before, school breaks tend to include multi-day programs for grades 3-5. We previously challenged participants to choreograph a robot dance party and extract their own DNA. This past winter break featured a two day program about the science of baking. Each day covered science concepts related to the recipes we tested. And the best part: participants ate their experiment products! We should note that we have approval from our village’s health department to provide food related programs. Our library is equipped with a kitchen and participants were making the food item themselves rather than staff. Before exploring food [...]

As part of our commitment to digital literacy, Skokie Public Library began offering a drop-in, one-hour coding program twice a month for kids in grades 3-5. The program is intended to expose kids to coding concepts and resources readily available in the library, and to help them create a community of practice where, regardless of skill level, kids are able to help and be helped by peers. We have two main facilitators for the program and host this out in the open of the Youth Department--all the better to attract curious kids who just happen to be in the library on [...]

Challenge-based programming is well received by multiple age groups at Skokie Public Library. These programs support 21st century learning skills like creative thinking, problem solving, and collaboration, all skills we’re eager to promote in activities for youth of a variety of ages. In various programs, we have facilitated watercraft design challenges where patrons are presented with a prompt, use limited materials to design and build their watercrafts, and then test them using a small water table. We’ve run this activity several ways, with several age ranges, and in several spaces; here’s a recap of them all, the better to give you [...]

In celebration of the spring weather, Skokie Public Library took our latest offering of Be the Scientist outdoors for a community photo walk. Be the Scientist is an hour-long program offered monthly for kids in grades 3-5 and encourages participants to try on different STEAM-related personas. It is part of a monthly series of programming including Be the Chef and Be the Artist. For this month, we asked participants to be photographers as well as civic engineers. Here’s what we did. Dandelion in hand by Marcus The program began with two discussion prompts: What makes a community? What makes [...]