TRW 2013: Dollar General Literacy Foundation, Molly Wetta

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Karen Allen, Teen Services Librarian, and Molly Wetta, YA Library Assistant

Karen Allen, Teen Services Librarian, and Molly Wetta, YA Library Assistant

Molly Wetta and Karen Allen of Lawrence Public Library are the innovative minds behind one of the Dollar General Literacy Foundation grant winning projects. Their Choose-Your-Own-Apocalypse scavenger hunt styled program kick starts their Teen Read Week celebration with a real life version of an alternative reality game whereby participants must “Seek the Unknown” throughout the city in order to survive the terror that awaits them.

You have read the introduction of the Choose-Your-Own-Apocalypse program and wonder about the basic rules for participation, thinking it might interest your library’s teen group.
In order to solve all of the clues for the hunt, participants must have transportation and some type of tech that will take digital photos. Teams cannot exceed the number of 6 teens but can be made up of the teen’s parents and/or siblings. Teams must also choose one hunt from the list of apocalypse themes of zombies, aliens, super volcano, or civil war. Three hours is the total time allotted to obtain the necessary items and successfully survive the apocalypse. All clues lead participants to items that will help them survive the apocalypse such as food, water, and medical supplies. In some cases, clues are released through the participation of community partners. One clue is announced over the air by a local campus radio station, another is positioned on a local business sign, and yet one more can be found in the ad section of the local paper.

You understand the basic rules and desire to know how this program connects with the idea to “Read for the Fun of It”, so you continue reading. Read More →

Obtaining Management Buy-In for Teen Programs

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It feels like destiny when you or your teen group discover the perfect match for Teen Read Week, pairing your creative library-themed program with the teen community. If your plans are met with disapproval or financial obstacles from fellow staff and/or management, it’s easy to get discouraged or it may become difficult to find the support to make their TRW plans come true. While our situations are unique and reflect different types of resistance, we are able to pull from each other’s experiences and implement a pro-active approach towards removing those barriers. In this post, we offer a mix of traditional and modern practices to help you strengthen support for young adult services.

‘ Prepare your advocate toolbox by equipping it with stats.

As librarians, we come to know our teen patrons by name and can recall their reading interests. We’ve heard their stories and have seen some of them grow up. These relationships enrich our work. Likewise, it is as important to know your community by their faces and background as it is to understand the community you serve (and don’t serve) through statistics. By having this additional knowledge, you will become a more experienced translator and better able to describe your community’s needs to management. Having numbers at hand will offer those success stories a background in which others may understand their values. Read More →

Teen Read Week: Teen Programming Flops Vent Session

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We often hear about amazing library programming-enormous board games, scavenger hunts, and stellar teen turnouts. ‘ But what about the programs that didn’t exactly work out as expected? ‘ Sometimes it happens! We can’t have perfect programs every time, but we can certainly make sure others don’t walk right into the same programming problems. Join us for the vent session, complete with goat poop, all-nighters, and a surprising amount of marshmallow-related problems. Please feel free to include your own Teen Programming Flop in the comments section-we’d love to hear. Let the commiseration begin!

By TTaylor (Own work) CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By TTaylor (Own work) CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Top Things We Learned

If you invite a goat to the library, make sure he’s wearing a good diaper.

Marshmallows are probably better outside toys.

All-nighters are less fun than they sound.

When all else fails, Gangnam Style videos on YouTube are a proven win.

Our Horror Stories

Public Domain Movies and The Bothersome Buffering

“For Teen Read Week one year, we had to pick from a list of programs to have, but I found out days before the program date, which had by then been advertised for months (via annoyingly tiny posters), that we were on our own to put together the described-by-someone-else program. I picked a Halloween horror movie, but then I found out that it had to be a public domain movie only, which, it turns out, means Really Old and Lame. All of our public domain horror DVDs were checked out, so someone sent me a website streaming old horror movies that we could play from the laptop. By old, I mean like, from the 30s. All of the ones that looked remotely fun popped up with an error message that said the content had been taken down due to copyright infringement. So we ended up with some random, ancient, lame movie with a picture too dark and grainy to see, and to boot, since it was streaming, it kept stopping every couple seconds to buffer. Most of the teens looked in and smartly walked on by, but I had one trooper who was content to watch this movie anyway. Soon, though, the other teens realized (exactly what I thought they would realize) that laptop= internet, so they came in and bogarted it and instead put on Youtube videos of Gangnam Style. I didn’t even protest!” Read More →

Teen Read Week Dollar General Literacy Spotlight, Lindsey Tomsu

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LaVistamuralLindsey Tomsu, of the La Vista Public Library in Nebraska, is the unofficial queen of the life-sized board games. ‘ She and her TAB already cooked up a life-size Candy Land board game, as well as an enormous version of their personal favorite, Arkham Horror. ‘ Lindsey and her TAB received the Dollar General Literacy Foundation grant for her Teen Read Week programming, another colossal board game: a life-sized Life! ‘ Here’s a bit more about her and her program:

Where did you get such a great idea?

Back in the summer of 2011, my TAB ended up doing a Life-Size Candy Land game for the kids at the library. It was a bunch of fun making the game props and such. We did the old school version pre-candy characters. So in the summer of 2012 we decided to apply for the TRW grant and do a life-size version of our favorite board game, Arkham Horror, which compared to Candy Land was way more work and more detail. Over the course of the two and a half months leading up to TRW my teens volunteered nearly 353 hours to make that program a reality. More information about this program can be seen in our article in School Library Journal. Read More →

Teen Read Week: Dollar General Literacy Foundation Spotlight, Jennifer Schureman

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JennyJennifer Schureman, head of Youth Services/YA Librarian from the Gloucester County Library System in New Jersey is one of the Teen Read Week 2013 Dollar General Literacy Foundation recipients. Her programming caught the eye the Teen Read Week Committee for its innovation, and incorporation of the Teen Read Week theme on such a large scale.

Here’s more about her Teen Read Week 2013 program:

 

Your Teen Read Week 2013 program is “Seeking the Secrets of NJ” can you briefly explain this and tell us what was your inspiration, and who was involved in planning this amazing adventure?
The inspiration for our program “Seeking the Secrets of NJ” came about because 2014 is the 350th Birthday of the State of New Jersey.’  It was the first time that I could incorporate such a commemorative event into the theme of Teen Read Week “Seek the Unknown @ your library”.’  The entire Youth Services Department of the Gloucester County Library System got together to share their amazing ideas about how to make this program fun and exciting for our teens.’  The program that emerged from this meeting will be both fun and informative for the teens.’  A “statewide scavenger hunt” is the basis of the program.’  Teens will perform activities including geocaching, internet searches, and code breaking along with traditional scavenger hunt clues, to uncover little known facts about the State of New Jersey. Read More →

Teen Read Week: Focus on Dollar Store Grant Winner, Cathy Andronik

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In honor of Teen Read Week and all the creative ideas librarians are busy planning and implementing this time of year, the Teen Read Week committee decided that we would post interviews with some of the winners of the Dollar General Literacy Foundation’s Teen Read Week grant. Ten librarians won $1,000 to implement their idea for Teen Read Week within their communities, but why only list their names in the official press release? We know you want to know what their grant-winning idea was, so this week and next week, be sure to check the YALSA blog as we pepper you with the interviews where we give you all the details.

The lovely Cathy Andronik

The lovely Cathy Andronik

First up, is Cathy Andronik from Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, CT. The two high schools in this urban area about an hour north of New York City each serve around 1700 students and the librarians frequently share good ideas, including their lunchtime book clubs. This could very well be because they used to work in the same school, as Cathy explains. “Until about three years ago, there were two librarians at each high school; then budget cuts forced a staff reduction to one per high school.’  Seniority enters the picture, and my wonderful colleague ended up at our crosstown rival.’  She and I had run a lunchtime book club together for several years already, sometimes through a YALSA grant, other times scrounging money wherever we could find it.’  We worked so well together, we promised each other that somehow we would find a way to combine our two clubs.”

Read More →

Teen Read Week: Using Pinterest to Plan Terrific Programming

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One of the best things about using Pinterest for me is that I never know when inspiration for library programming is going to strike. Whether it happens when I’m actually surfing through my feed of pins from boards I follow (and following a diversity of interests is key here) or when I’m combing through my RSS feed in the morning, I invariably find ideas that would make great programs. But how do you use Pinterest when you are actively trying to plan specific programs, particularly with Teen Read Week in mind?

Curating Information

The first use for Pinterest is as a visual board to present pre-curated ideas, one I use quite frequently with my Library Advisory Board when we are discussing possible ideas for special events. When we planned our Night of Writing Dangerously last year (an evening where kids came to do nothing but eat and write in a fun environment), I first projected my Writing Tips & Tricks Board as inspiration for their thoughts. Not only did my students have fun picking out the t-shirts and mugs that would become our prizes, but the infographics and tips had them asking if volunteer teachers could be “grammar police” someone could flag down with a question, or if we could use one of our glass walls to chart the rise and fall of a short story. My Hunger Games Library Programming Ideas Board absolutely made our party when the first movie came out (over half our school came to it) since it enabled students to plan Capitol hair and make up stations, Wii archery tournaments, and a Facebook Profile picture corner with life-size cardboard cutouts of the actors – and I owe it all to Pinterest.

Adding students or other faculty (or librarians) to a collaborative board is a terrific way of putting the power of idea generation in their hands. YALSA traditionally adds members of the Teen Read Week committee to the Teen Read Week 2013 Board and you can see the theme of “Seek the Unknown” played out largely in the areas of science fiction and mystery-related pins, the two pieces the majority of librarians identify as their intended focus for next week. Many minds are usually superior to a measly single mind, so collaborative boards often build off each other, and you can set your account to notify you by email when someone else pins to the board in question. There have been many instances that I see what someone pinned in an email notification and it makes me think of a whole new search term to try, a fact which brings us to our next (and most crucial) point regarding Pinterest. Read More →