This fall the Anchorage Public Library was approached by a representative from Alaska Common Ground. Their organization had a grant to start a series of community dialogs and were hoping to partner with the library. And so with the added partner of the University of Alaska Cooperative Extension Service, Let's Talk Alaska was born.
Here I am going to quote our formal introduction:
Let's Talk Anchorage is a joint program of the Anchorage Public Libraries, Alaska Common Ground, and the UAF Cooperative Extension Service. Our vision is a community of citizens who gather easily and often for public dialogue or deliberation on timely topics. LTA can help plan, publicize, and facilitate public gatherings that are welcoming, stimulating, and satisfying.
Our first dialog posed a very simple question: What is the Occupy movement? Without the library or Let's Talk Anchorage taking a stand for or against it, we convened to discuss. The worldwide occupy movement is extremely timely, garners lots of media attention, and has brought their issues to the forefront of our national conversation. Despite all this, there are still many of us (myself included) without a very clear idea of what the Occupy movement is, who they are, what they want, etc. As this event was planned, promoted, and presented I heard over and over again that people wanted to know more. Hey! That's our business as a library! We can do that! And so we did, but we didn't do it alone. We did it with a committee of volunteers, the Let's Talk Anchorage group, facilitators, and others who all pitched in.
This is getting wordy. Let me get down to technical details.
Program Structure
Date: Saturday December 17th; Time: 1pm to 4pm
Set up: 12 tables scattered "randomly" around the room for a World Cafe set up (that is a specific type of facilitated dialog). It turns out I'm not good at setting up tables randomly, I like to line them up in neat rows. Drink table with water, lemonade, coffee, hot water and tea. (I could not keep up with the coffee demands with two 12 cup coffee pots.) Snack table with cookies, crackers, cheese, and mini-oranges. (Snacks and drinks provided by the aforementioned grant money.) The participant tables were covered in butcher paper and participants were provided with markers for writing. (We also had flowers at each table, a very nice touch.)
The idea of World Cafe is that there is no "front" of the room, but we did have a video screen down to show a short film. We begun with quick introductions. The first film was a collection of clips about the Occupy movement edited together as an introduction. Then various members of the Occupy Anchorage group stood up and talked about why they were involved in Occupy Anchorage.
Then a break, an introduction to the World Cafe format and we broke into small group discussions. Each table had a facilitator and ideally 4 to 5 participants. For each 20 minute discussion time period a different question was posed. The facilitator was not there for their own opinions but to keep things civil, flowing, and prevent filibusters.
We framed the discussion around three questions. At the end of each 20 minute period, all the participants got up and moved to a new table for the next question discussion. (Facilitators stayed put). The idea was to find an entirely new table of people to talk to, to mix and remix the participants.
Our three questions:
What about this movement resonates with me?
What about this movement confuses or concerns me?
What do I want to explore and/or discuss more?
Then there was another break and an opportunity for group reflections and a closing.
Outcomes
We had about a two week lead time (or slightly less) for advertising this. I didn't know what to expect. We put out tables for 50, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. 48 people came! They were primarily Occupy movement supporters (even if not involved in the project) and self-proclaimed "liberals", but we had a legislator and a legislative candidate (Republican nonetheless) come as well.
The evaluation forms were overwhelmingly positive as were the comments I received directly from participants. People were very glad we had the program and excited about the possibility of more. From a library point of view, we were thrilled with the turn out and response of the participants. From the Let's Talk Anchorage point of view, we were thrilled as well.
Overall the entire project was a win. Where there things we learned? Yes. Will we do things differently? Yes. But that is true of every program. We proved civic dialogs will work in our community, there is a market for them. The library has a great reputation as a neutral space and is the perfect venue for this type of community conversation. And such a conversation perfectly aligns with the library's mission to facilitate information transfer. I look forward to working further with Let's Talk Anchorage and hosting more community conversations at our various locations.
Showing posts with label programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label programs. Show all posts
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Combining Passions
Anyone who has been paying attention by now has realized two things. 1) I love being a librarian. 2) I love to knit and crochet. And now I shall combine those two.
Have you heard of Yarnbombing? (That blog isn't the only one. Go Google it. A Google images search is even more fun. It's a real thing, getting bigger all the time.
Look at these bike racks outside the Berkeley Public Library
It's not quite yarnbombing, but a library in the UK created a knitted garden that is an amazing and ongoing intergenerational community art project.
Somewhere in these stories a project for my library was born. This fall is the 25th anniversary of the Loussac Library. To celebrate that we are inviting the public to knit or crocheting hats to decorate the statues and busts of famous authors throughout the library.
We are calling this Hats Off To Loussac Library. Hats can be dropped off between August 1st and September 5th at any Anchorage Public Library location. They will be on display between August 15th and September 17th at Loussac Library. After the anniversary, all hats will be donated to charities.
Click for more information
Happy Knitting! Happy Crocheting! And as always, Happy Reading! (It might be fun to listen to an audio book while knitting and/or crocheting a hat. That's my plan.)
Have you heard of Yarnbombing? (That blog isn't the only one. Go Google it. A Google images search is even more fun. It's a real thing, getting bigger all the time.
Look at these bike racks outside the Berkeley Public Library
It's not quite yarnbombing, but a library in the UK created a knitted garden that is an amazing and ongoing intergenerational community art project.
Somewhere in these stories a project for my library was born. This fall is the 25th anniversary of the Loussac Library. To celebrate that we are inviting the public to knit or crocheting hats to decorate the statues and busts of famous authors throughout the library.
We are calling this Hats Off To Loussac Library. Hats can be dropped off between August 1st and September 5th at any Anchorage Public Library location. They will be on display between August 15th and September 17th at Loussac Library. After the anniversary, all hats will be donated to charities.
Click for more information
Happy Knitting! Happy Crocheting! And as always, Happy Reading! (It might be fun to listen to an audio book while knitting and/or crocheting a hat. That's my plan.)
Friday, April 15, 2011
Five Things on a Friday - Teen Programming Edition
I'm updating again! This time is all about the ups and downs of teen programming at our library. As I've said before we share a parking lot with a middle school. We get tons of teens, pre-teens, tweens, and hangers-on. Here, very briefly, are five things that work for us. Or they're working for us as of right now. It's still very much a work in progress. I will eventually write an update with our entire trials and tribulations.
- Food. Food brings them in. It doesn't seen to matter what, just food. We were wondering around Costco trying to find affordable relatively healthy edition. We ran into someone else buying for large quantities of teens too. Costco is the place to go. I don't know if it is our neighborhood (very low on the socio-economic scale) that heightens it, but every group of teens I've worked with can be bribed with food.
- Popcorn. Popcorn is cheap. We got one of those very large popcorn machines (not the countertop one, the one in its own little cart) and a 50 pound bag of popcorn, 500 popcorn bags, and a ton of oil. We're set for a while. It's simple, but the kids love it. And the coolness factor is so much greater with the machine popcorn than the microwave stuff, plus it is easier to portion out.
- Ukuleles. Ukuleles are cool. Teens and hipsters love them. A local store cut us a deal (ask for the educator discount) and we picked up half a dozen ukes. Our youth services librarian plays ukulele. The kids play their instruments, bring their own, borrow ours. I had them sitting out at the teen afterschool program and they were never idle. My favorite afternoons are the ones where we get impromptu concerts of kids singing and playing. One teen is even writing her own songs!
- Playing cards. Cards are never out of style. We have a board game cabinet for the teens to use and however many decks of cards I put in there get checked out. I remember from my own teen years always keeping a deck of cards in my backpack. Their popularity does not seem to wane and of course the games that can be played are limitless.
- The current iteration of our teen program is an "Open Zone" where they can come/go and hang out, play games, etc. We were struggling with how to keep track of how many teens were coming with all the in/out. So I counted how many cups I put out by the lemonade. A few kids took more than one cup (though they were encouraged to just refill) and a few kids took no drink. If we assume that those kids cancel each other out, and since it makes my life easier we will assume they do, we had 78 kids at our last teen zone event.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Gross Science Program
Now that summer is over, vacation is over, and I can finally recover, I would like to start posting some of my favorite and most sucessful programs from the summer. Having already discussed the Harry Potter event in great detail, I will move to my second favorite event of the summer - our Gross Science program.
Logistics:
Gross Science was held on an afternoon (2pm) for one hour. It was registration only, 30ish spots, filled up, and we did not take a waiting list. (Though anyone who showed up hoping to snag a no-show's spot was allowed in.) The program was aimed at boys ages 7-10, but anyone was allowed in. It was almost perfectly half/half gender divide, ages 6 to 11 attended (with the greatest cluster around 7 to 9), and about 35 kids came. Total supply cost is around $30.
Set up:
I had a large meeting room at my disposal. I put tables against all the walls and left the middle area empty. Each table (actually a wall with two or three tables pushed together) had a different station. No one was allowed in early (of course I was still setting up until the last second). When everyone came in, they all sat in the middle.
Getting the gross fun started:
All the kids are sitting in the middle, facing me and the "front" (In a room with stations on all sides, front is a relative concept, but they were facing the projection screen.) What could be grosser than poop? So that is how we started things. We did some fun facts about poop. How much do you poop a day? (There's a fun math formula to help you figure it out.) How does poop help us? How can we use it? Poop helped us fight WWII. (German soldiers fighting in North Africa believed it was good luck to roll their tanks through camel dung, so Allied soliders began hiding bombs under the dung.) Kids had fun with the facts and guessing which animal pooped the most, etc. However this was mostly short. I then held up a copy of The Truth About Poop and explained that this was the source of all of my facts. (See resource list below). At this point the parents who hadn't left (just unobtrusively hanging out in the back) were looking rather queasy.
Then we went into a powerpoint that was projecting on the wall of a "match the poop" game. Each slide had two pictures of poop and two animal pictures. First the poop would appear and the kids would shout out guesses. Then (when I raised my hand they went silent, mostly) the two choices would appear. We would vote on which ones we thought matched. With a click of my magic mouse, lines would be drawn connecting the animal and their droppings. Super fun.
Next we read a book about mealworms (A Mealworm's Life by John Himmelman).
Starting the stations:
At this point we were ready to start the kids on the stations where they would spend the bulk of the program. I walked from station to station explaining what they were and what they would do. (In an ideal world we would have one staff member or volunteer for each station, in my world we just had me.) All the kids were given a handout that explained some basic fun facts, stuff about each station, reading list, website list, etc. And they got a bag to carry things around in. Then I turned the kids loose. They could go to any station, in any order, and stay as long as they liked. I encouraged them that if one station was full they could go somewhere else and come back when it was less busy.
Station one: Owl Pellets
On the right side table I had some owl pellets set up for the kids to disect. I had information about what you could expect to see in the owl pellets (bones, hair, fur, etc). Owl pellets are paper plates with disection tools (plastic pointy things). I got the pellets from Operation Wildlife for a $1.50 sterilization fee each. Great deal! They are a local group here, check for a local group or find someone to ship to you. This was not as popular as I expected, but many of the kids had done it recently in school.
Station two: Fake Poop
On the table to the right, clockwise, of the front, this one I really spread out over three tables together so many kids could work at once. At this point, I had put up on the projector pictures of the different poop types. A few pictures on the tables would have been nice too. I made my own play dough and colored it brown. (I have a great recipe I will post later.) To color it brown I put in black food coloring (available separately from the rest of the pack) and added in some of the yellow and red for warmer tones. It was a rather grayish brown, but it was real looking enough to be gross. I also purchased a large bag of hamster food that had lots of seeds etc. Kids rolled these seeds, nuts, shells, etc into their poop pellets. Corn is a good filler (and often isn't digested and shows in feces). These fake poop pieces were then placed in ziplock baggies and into their carrying bags. Actually I already had the playdough divided into chunks in baggies to keep one child from taking it all, so they put it back in their baggie. It was a good system. Some children really got into making their poop look like a specific animal's poop. Lots of fun, especially after the owl pellets.
Station three: Mealworms
Continuing clockwise around the room, this was on the "back" wall, opposite the front, projector, and station one. This was also two tables or more. When explaining the stations, this one took the most time. Kids spent the most time here, enjoyed it the most, and in the past few months it is the one they mention to me the most when they come in. I bought mealworms (a hundred of them cost $5.99) at a pet store (when I was buying the hamster food for fake poop). They're in the refrigerator section (to be fed to lizards and what not). If you try to keep them in your fridge be careful, they can't get too cold without dying. I bought them the day before and just let them thaw overnight. I recommend this to get them more active. I learned just as much about mealworms from talking to the pet shop guy who raises them for his lizards as I did from books and websites. I bought them and then dropped some potato bits (for moisture) into the grain stuff they were in. They liked the dark and calm of my cabinet (which also kept my cat from trying to eat them). They were most active immediately after being removed from a darkened cabinet so I tried to keep them in something resembling that right up until I showed them to the kids.
We had "experiments" the kids could do with the mealworms. There were mealworms still in their tupperware (butter tub style) container from the pet store and some on paper plates. As well there were magnifying glasses and paper towels. They wrote the answers/observations with golf pencils onto their handout.
Questions to explore:
*The dark and light paperplate had half of it covered up with paper taped down like a little "roof" for the mealworms to crawl under.
Next the kids got to make a "mealworm habitat" to take home. We had babyfood jars (with holes punched in the lids). They put some oats (regular oatmeal) in the bottom and a piece of potato. Their handout included some mealworm care instructions. They never need water, they'll get the moisture from the potato. Kids then placed a few mealworms in the jar to take home (but only if their parents approved). Even as the beetles they'll eventually turn into, they really can't escape. Kids were also encouraged to move their mealworms to a bigger container eventually (any sort of small butter tub or other washed former plastic food container such as a cottage cheese tub will work). I think every single kid took home some meal worms. The rest of them were set free in a compost pile and a garden. These mealworms were destined to be food so I felt not bat at all about giving them to children. One child has sucessfully bred a new generation of mealworms.
Station four: Fake Snot
This is on the next wall in our clockwise circle. Following the instructions here we made fake snot. I had big bowls of water and borax solution, gallon jugs of glue, spoons for measuring, and small cups for mixing (as well as craft sticks to mix with). It all goes into a ziplock baggie at the end. The neon food coloring is particularly fun for this. We went through two and a half vials of green food coloring.
Station five: Books and resources
Back on the "front" wall, on the left of the projection I had a table full of books for kids to check out. I requested every copy of these titles in my system and almost all of them were checked out. Usually at a program, one or two people take a book, here everyone left with at least one book, many left with multiple books. Especially popular were mealworm books (to care for their new pets).
Booklist
A Mealworm’s Life by John Himmelman
Mealworms by Donna Schaffer
Mealworms: Raise them, watch them, see them, change by Adrienne Mason
Grossology by Sylvia Branzei
Grossology and You by Sylvia Branzei
Hands-on Grossology by Slvia Branzei
Gross Universe by Jeff Szpirglas
Gross Science Experiments by Q. L. Pearce
Truth About Poop by Susan Goodman
What Stinks by Marilyn Singer
Jurassic Poop by Jacob Berkowitz
Gee Whiz! It’s All About Pee by Susan Goodman
Web Resources
Learn about mealworms, interesting activity ideas
Grossology
There is more out there, but I'll let you enjoy finding it. This was one of my favorite programs ever. I'll try to figure out how to get the handouts online or email me if you would like them.
Logistics:
Gross Science was held on an afternoon (2pm) for one hour. It was registration only, 30ish spots, filled up, and we did not take a waiting list. (Though anyone who showed up hoping to snag a no-show's spot was allowed in.) The program was aimed at boys ages 7-10, but anyone was allowed in. It was almost perfectly half/half gender divide, ages 6 to 11 attended (with the greatest cluster around 7 to 9), and about 35 kids came. Total supply cost is around $30.
Set up:
I had a large meeting room at my disposal. I put tables against all the walls and left the middle area empty. Each table (actually a wall with two or three tables pushed together) had a different station. No one was allowed in early (of course I was still setting up until the last second). When everyone came in, they all sat in the middle.
Getting the gross fun started:
All the kids are sitting in the middle, facing me and the "front" (In a room with stations on all sides, front is a relative concept, but they were facing the projection screen.) What could be grosser than poop? So that is how we started things. We did some fun facts about poop. How much do you poop a day? (There's a fun math formula to help you figure it out.) How does poop help us? How can we use it? Poop helped us fight WWII. (German soldiers fighting in North Africa believed it was good luck to roll their tanks through camel dung, so Allied soliders began hiding bombs under the dung.) Kids had fun with the facts and guessing which animal pooped the most, etc. However this was mostly short. I then held up a copy of The Truth About Poop and explained that this was the source of all of my facts. (See resource list below). At this point the parents who hadn't left (just unobtrusively hanging out in the back) were looking rather queasy.
Then we went into a powerpoint that was projecting on the wall of a "match the poop" game. Each slide had two pictures of poop and two animal pictures. First the poop would appear and the kids would shout out guesses. Then (when I raised my hand they went silent, mostly) the two choices would appear. We would vote on which ones we thought matched. With a click of my magic mouse, lines would be drawn connecting the animal and their droppings. Super fun.
Next we read a book about mealworms (A Mealworm's Life by John Himmelman).
Starting the stations:
At this point we were ready to start the kids on the stations where they would spend the bulk of the program. I walked from station to station explaining what they were and what they would do. (In an ideal world we would have one staff member or volunteer for each station, in my world we just had me.) All the kids were given a handout that explained some basic fun facts, stuff about each station, reading list, website list, etc. And they got a bag to carry things around in. Then I turned the kids loose. They could go to any station, in any order, and stay as long as they liked. I encouraged them that if one station was full they could go somewhere else and come back when it was less busy.
Station one: Owl Pellets
On the right side table I had some owl pellets set up for the kids to disect. I had information about what you could expect to see in the owl pellets (bones, hair, fur, etc). Owl pellets are paper plates with disection tools (plastic pointy things). I got the pellets from Operation Wildlife for a $1.50 sterilization fee each. Great deal! They are a local group here, check for a local group or find someone to ship to you. This was not as popular as I expected, but many of the kids had done it recently in school.
Station two: Fake Poop
On the table to the right, clockwise, of the front, this one I really spread out over three tables together so many kids could work at once. At this point, I had put up on the projector pictures of the different poop types. A few pictures on the tables would have been nice too. I made my own play dough and colored it brown. (I have a great recipe I will post later.) To color it brown I put in black food coloring (available separately from the rest of the pack) and added in some of the yellow and red for warmer tones. It was a rather grayish brown, but it was real looking enough to be gross. I also purchased a large bag of hamster food that had lots of seeds etc. Kids rolled these seeds, nuts, shells, etc into their poop pellets. Corn is a good filler (and often isn't digested and shows in feces). These fake poop pieces were then placed in ziplock baggies and into their carrying bags. Actually I already had the playdough divided into chunks in baggies to keep one child from taking it all, so they put it back in their baggie. It was a good system. Some children really got into making their poop look like a specific animal's poop. Lots of fun, especially after the owl pellets.
Station three: Mealworms
Continuing clockwise around the room, this was on the "back" wall, opposite the front, projector, and station one. This was also two tables or more. When explaining the stations, this one took the most time. Kids spent the most time here, enjoyed it the most, and in the past few months it is the one they mention to me the most when they come in. I bought mealworms (a hundred of them cost $5.99) at a pet store (when I was buying the hamster food for fake poop). They're in the refrigerator section (to be fed to lizards and what not). If you try to keep them in your fridge be careful, they can't get too cold without dying. I bought them the day before and just let them thaw overnight. I recommend this to get them more active. I learned just as much about mealworms from talking to the pet shop guy who raises them for his lizards as I did from books and websites. I bought them and then dropped some potato bits (for moisture) into the grain stuff they were in. They liked the dark and calm of my cabinet (which also kept my cat from trying to eat them). They were most active immediately after being removed from a darkened cabinet so I tried to keep them in something resembling that right up until I showed them to the kids.
We had "experiments" the kids could do with the mealworms. There were mealworms still in their tupperware (butter tub style) container from the pet store and some on paper plates. As well there were magnifying glasses and paper towels. They wrote the answers/observations with golf pencils onto their handout.
Questions to explore:
- Do you see any exoskeletons shed by the larva? Look at them under the microscope. What do you notice?
- Pick up a larva mealworm. Does it wiggle? Does it wiggle more when you hold an end instead of the middle?
- If you put your mealworm on a plate, does it move toward the damp side (wet paper towel) or dry?
- On the dark and light plate*, does your meal worm move to the dark or to the light?
*The dark and light paperplate had half of it covered up with paper taped down like a little "roof" for the mealworms to crawl under.
Next the kids got to make a "mealworm habitat" to take home. We had babyfood jars (with holes punched in the lids). They put some oats (regular oatmeal) in the bottom and a piece of potato. Their handout included some mealworm care instructions. They never need water, they'll get the moisture from the potato. Kids then placed a few mealworms in the jar to take home (but only if their parents approved). Even as the beetles they'll eventually turn into, they really can't escape. Kids were also encouraged to move their mealworms to a bigger container eventually (any sort of small butter tub or other washed former plastic food container such as a cottage cheese tub will work). I think every single kid took home some meal worms. The rest of them were set free in a compost pile and a garden. These mealworms were destined to be food so I felt not bat at all about giving them to children. One child has sucessfully bred a new generation of mealworms.
Station four: Fake Snot
This is on the next wall in our clockwise circle. Following the instructions here we made fake snot. I had big bowls of water and borax solution, gallon jugs of glue, spoons for measuring, and small cups for mixing (as well as craft sticks to mix with). It all goes into a ziplock baggie at the end. The neon food coloring is particularly fun for this. We went through two and a half vials of green food coloring.
Station five: Books and resources
Back on the "front" wall, on the left of the projection I had a table full of books for kids to check out. I requested every copy of these titles in my system and almost all of them were checked out. Usually at a program, one or two people take a book, here everyone left with at least one book, many left with multiple books. Especially popular were mealworm books (to care for their new pets).
Booklist
A Mealworm’s Life by John Himmelman
Mealworms by Donna Schaffer
Mealworms: Raise them, watch them, see them, change by Adrienne Mason
Grossology by Sylvia Branzei
Grossology and You by Sylvia Branzei
Hands-on Grossology by Slvia Branzei
Gross Universe by Jeff Szpirglas
Gross Science Experiments by Q. L. Pearce
Truth About Poop by Susan Goodman
What Stinks by Marilyn Singer
Jurassic Poop by Jacob Berkowitz
Gee Whiz! It’s All About Pee by Susan Goodman
Web Resources
Learn about mealworms, interesting activity ideas
Grossology
There is more out there, but I'll let you enjoy finding it. This was one of my favorite programs ever. I'll try to figure out how to get the handouts online or email me if you would like them.
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