Program: Star Wars Reads Day

Wow. I am so behind on program write-ups. How does this happen? I really need to get better about just sitting down and doing them immediately following a program. I am a bad blogger.

Anyway, this was the second year our library participated in Star Wars Reads Day, held the first Saturday in October. We certainly learned some things from last year, so our major change was to have the activities for older kids in the upstairs program room and the activities for younger kids in our Children's Program Room. Since my main focus is still on the tween age group (though we are all trying to do a greater variety of programming), I headed upstairs with our teen librarian. Here's what we had for the older kids.

Cubees: these are easy crafts on the part of staff, but require a lot of focus and patience from the kids. We printed out a bunch of different Star Wars characters and pre-cut all the slits ahead of time. That way, the kids would just need to cut out the characters and piece it together. They were very popular and we ran out of some characters rather quickly.

Action figures: by which I mean decorate your own Star Wars peg doll. But it sounds cooler if you say action figure, so let's just go with that. We bought a bunch of small wooden peg dolls and set out lots of supplies for the kids to decorate with. The aforementioned teen librarian made some excellent examples, including an Ewok and Princess Leia, which many kids attempted to copy.

Character heads: that sounds a bit gruesome, doesn't it? I don't know what else to call this craft. We had a number of small wooden blocks left over from our Minecraft program that we needed to repurpose, so my colleague came up with the idea of decorating them as various Star Wars characters heads and attaching magnets to the back. She made a lovely Boba Fett example, which I got to take home for my Fett-obsessed boyfriend. Once again, her examples were so good that everyone tried to copy them.

Gaming: we set up our Xbox Kinect with a Star Wars game in the front of the room and the kids took turns practicing their Jedi skills. This worked much better than last year, when we had a number of kids who were too little to even register on the Kinect sensor trying to play. Everyone did well taking turns, too.

Lightsaber practice: we taped off a small corner in the back of the room and set out some homemade lightsabers and balloons for practice sessions. The idea was for the kids to keep the balloons in the air, but, of course, they tried to battle each other with the lightsabers. We stopped them. Not as popular as the lightsaber making we did last year, but that was chaos that we wanted to avoid this time around.

And that was our Star Wars Reads Day. We also had giveaways, thanks to the lovely publishers involved, and, as I mentioned, a whole different set of activities for younger kids in another part of the library. What did you do for SWRD?