Program: A Bonanza of Recaps!

As I may have mentioned a time or twenty, I am incredibly far behind on my reviews. That includes my program write-ups. So, I'm going to try to knock out a handful of them all at once!

My Little Pony Party: holy cats my friends, was this program insanely popular! We actually had to postpone it because their was bad weather on our originally scheduled date, but that didn't stop the crowds from coming. We actually did this program as a two-pronged event: in the Children's Program Room, my boss had activities and games for younger MLP fans, while in the Upstairs Program Room, my coworker and myself had activities for older fans (up to 18). For young fans, we had Pin the Cutie Mark on Rainbow Dash, coloring sheets, color a pony mask, very simple Shrinky Dinks, and a scavenger hunt. Our activities with tweens and teens included more advanced Shrinky Dinks, creating your own pony (highly coveted - made from Dollar Store ponies we painted white ahead of time), and some very intense trivia. Leading up to the program, I took it upon myself to watch all the episodes of MLP so I could meet our patrons where they were at - it has definitely helped me, both in the program and beyond, to be versed in the pony-verse. Am I a Pegasister now?

Meet the Artist: over the past few months, this program has continued to see decent turnout with one exception. We have covered Matisse (construction paper collages), Mondrian (geometric primary color paintings), Kandinsky (drawing to music - I played four different styles of music for about 10 minutes each and encouraged them to draw how the music made them feel: classical, bluegrass, rock, and jazz), Banksy (creating our own stencils), and Picasso (Cubist faces). I am surprised and pleased that this program has continued to do well. Banksy was my one exception for attendance, but I'm going to blame it on the weather - it was the first nice day we had seen in a long time!

Chocolate Olympics: I had to take advantage of the Winter Olympics this year so I hosted this program (and another one, which I'll talk about shortly). Tweens competed in Whopper races (pushing a Whopper with their nose through a course), Oreo stacking (much harder than it sounds!), the Hershey Kiss race (unwrapping a Kiss while wearing oven mitts), M&M sorting, and Chocolate Pictionary (using a chocolate bar as our drawing tool). The Pictionary was, by far, their favorite event and I think my teen volunteers had just as much fun as the patrons!

Look for another set of program write-ups soon!