Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit another branch and do some programming. My colleage challenged me to come up with an activity that would get the tweens off of the internet games on the public computers and into the program room for the activity. That was quite the challenge!
How do you decide if an event is a success? Usually the number of people in attendance is a good indicator, and one that the state wants us to report. But what if you only have three people from your intended audience attend? Can you still call that a successful
On Monday, we celebrated America's birthday with some STEM activities! As always, we started with some reading, and I intentionally chose books that included images of fireworks. I also included a number of non-fiction Independence Day titles in my book display, along with this title: We started by reading A is for America, by Devin
Leading up to the holidays, people are often busy buying gifts and decorating their homes. So, this year, I decided to offer different decorative crafts each week in December. One of the most popular was the paper spheres. The craft is simple to do, and only requires strips of paper, a hole punch, and brads
Taking the STEAM concept in a slightly different direction, last week we hosted a program at the Depot Park all about transportation. This is always a popular theme, and since we were meeting at the Depot (as in train!) Park, it seemed like a natural fit. The Erlanger Depot Museum is one of the last
During spring break this year, I tried a new program aimed specifically for 8-12 year olds. We met each afternoon for two hours to work on creating paper automata. I had a limit of 25 participants, and required pre-registration in order to attend. Registration started out slow, and about the time I began to get
What can you do with an hour, a large box, some assorted IKEA packing materials, a few plastic fasteners, and some kids? All kinds of cool things! We recently held another "open building" program at KCPL. This time, our building materials included one very large box, pieces of cardboard of various sizes, shapes, and thickness,
Fate is a funny thing. A few months ago I got ambitious one week, and wrote and published ( I thought) three blog articles. Unbeknownst to me, it was the same week that the STAR_Net blog was being moved to its new home on this website. For some reason, one of my articles made the
There's lots of research these days that supports the idea that a healthy body supports a healthy mind and intellect, improving one's ability to learn, understand, and retain information. Cultures throughout history may or may not have made the connection between a healthy body and a healthy mind,
Last week my Crafternoon participants (with a few moms and one teen-aged sister included) enjoyed a paper plane tournament. It was a wonderful, low cost, quick prep program which everyone enjoyed thoroughly. I collected all the paper airplane books that my library system owned, added quite a few that I bought online, and had them laid
