Today's post comes to us from the rad Krista Blomberg of Rib Lake Public Library!
Eureka! A Successful Teen Program!
Do you struggle with programming for teens in your library like I do? Do you plan a program only to have maybe one or two teens participate? Well, this fall I came across an idea on the Programming Librarian Interest Group on Facebook that sounded worth trying with our area teens. It involved the concept of Tiny Art, small pieces of art about a 4x4 inch size. I started by creating two art kit options for High School students (or homeschooling high schoolers) to pick up. One kit had 4 colors of acryllic paint (red, blue, yellow and white) along with a paintbrush and a 4x4 canvas. The other option was a set of watercolor paints and paintbrush, along with a 4x4 square of watercolor paper which our HS art teacher offered to contribute. All the kits included a Title/Author tag as well as an information sheet with details and important dates for returning to display in the art show. 30 kits of each were assembled which was ambitious on my part given our history with teen programming. I was feeling hopeful about the Take and Make format appealing to this age group. I got excited when the high school art teacher agreed to let her room be a pickup location for the kits and offered to use it for extra credit for students who participated. We delivered 25 of each to the high school and kept 5 of each at the library for area home/virtual school students.
How did it go? We had 3 kits left at the library and 10 kits left at the school by Mid-October which means 47 kits were taken! Thats 47 teens participating in a self-directed program! That's huge in my corner of the library programming world. We followed up the self-directed program with the Tiny Art Show portion for any teens who decided to share their art with us. 16 teens decided to bring their creations in to display in our TEEN Tiny Art Show. Now you might think that's not many returns, but it is still a record around here 
. We left the display up for the month of November and did our best to count anyone who took an interest in viewing it. We counted at least 60 people who came in to see the art show while it was on display and many of them commented on how much they loved it. I think next time I would love to have a comment box so the artists could share in some of the wonderful feedback. I also asked the artists for permission to share their art on social media in a video format after the physical display was done. They all gave permission. I created the video using the iMovie app and then uploading it to YouTube and sharing it on our Facebook page. Here is link in anyone would like to take a look at their creations: https://youtu.be/
. We left the display up for the month of November and did our best to count anyone who took an interest in viewing it. We counted at least 60 people who came in to see the art show while it was on display and many of them commented on how much they loved it. I think next time I would love to have a comment box so the artists could share in some of the wonderful feedback. I also asked the artists for permission to share their art on social media in a video format after the physical display was done. They all gave permission. I created the video using the iMovie app and then uploading it to YouTube and sharing it on our Facebook page. Here is link in anyone would like to take a look at their creations: https://youtu.be/
The way this worked out sparked the idea to try another idea I learned from the same Facebook group (Programming Interest Librarian) "Two Sentence Terror Tales" (or other genre) in the future in a similar way, working with the High school or Middle school English teachers. I'm excited to try and that is a big step forward for this youth services librarian.
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