Long story short: I am WAY behind on sharing with y’all all the fun themes we’ve had over the past (counts on fingers) five months or so. So. Lemme start catchin’ y’all up! This year we decided to focus October’s theme around pumpkins! After all, the area’s most popular pumpkin patch is part of our…
The idea for Joyful January happened back in November, when I flipped out over some tissue paper art that Natasia did. I had a vision of seeing whispy images through the tissue paper, and then I realized that we could sandwich a photo between tissue paper and it would look like the memory spheres from…
This is one of those ideas that I really can’t explain how I came up with it. It just sort of happened. About a month prior to having this idea, I had a realization: use all of the front entryway windows at our main library building for programming flyers. Prior to this idea, all events…
Our summer programming usually goes through the end of August, and like public librarians everywhere, we’re exhausted once it’s over. Generally in August I try and give our team a break from decorating, and we “reset” the library to a neutral state. Which can be fun since it’s generally when we get the most compliments…
After over a year of excitement awaiting what the “new art process” for the CSLP would yield, I was disappointed (to say the very least). That’s all I’ll say about that. So back to the literal drawing board I went! I must give a HUGE shout-out to both Angie and Bryce for brainstorming ideas to…
Every-once-in-a-while my team gets stumped on décor for a theme. We throw out ideas and then we throw out those ideas. And nothing goes “ding” like you hope it will. It was like that for this past summer’s CSLP theme: On Your Mark, Get Set…Read! We talked about book characters, giant foam hands, and lots…
The prep for this year’s front window display began a full month prior, where we put out mysterious colorful squares containing two black lines. We instructed our youngest patrons to write their name on the top line, and then a book or book series’ name on the second line. We then kept the squares. That’s…
This year the schools’ art teachers graciously bowed out of the Artsy April community art show at the library. And so, my team set out to redefine Artsy April. And, like Decemberley, we decided for now to shift our focus to book illustrators. Natasia had the strongest idea and drive to focus on Dr. Seuss…
Our theme for March was I Spy for no particular reason but that we wanted to have an I Spy themed month. Yep! It’s as fun as it looks! Natasia and Shelby worked together on making these windows both cute and playable. Big shout-out to Shelby’s Mom who found out what we were doing and…
February 2016! It was a blur of blurriness that involved death and a depressing road trip from California to Nebraska. Bet you didn’t see that coming with a post with the words “puppy love” in it. But I felt that I should explain why there’s really only one photo of what we did. Natasia, one…
Fun Fact: last year’s Decemberley is one of my favorite themes. I mean, it keeps things holiday neutral and the name itself is just so much fun. Funner Fact: beyond snowmen, there really aren’t a lot of wintry Ed Emberley illustrations that are not holidaycentric. Funnest Fact: this may be our last Decemberley because of…
In previous years, I’ve had lots of wordplay fun with November. This year, I wasn’t really feeling super-de-dooper inspired. At some point I’ll quasi-repeat Dinovember , because there’s so many different things that we can do with it (and it’s both funny and punny). UPDATE: We repeated it in 2017 /end update But at this…
Several months ago I did something that would have shocked me even a year ago: I trolled an online youth services Facebook group (with the admins’ permission). My intentions with that post was to hopefully cause youth service librarians take a fresh look at how and why they promote holidays (particularly Christmas). I wanted others…
Eep! I’ve had to let the blogging slide a bit since things in my life and at work have been…interesting. Yes. We’ll say interesting. But we’ve had some great themes that I’ve been dying to share with y’all, so let’s get back to it. Back in September we had a big crossover celebration of Minecraft…
In general, I hate to repeat themes at the Children’s Library, but this one was a no-brainer and lends itself to lots of variation. PLUS there’s no way we would be able to beat last year’s numbers without doing another Little Library LEGO Checkout Club (not that I’m a slave to numbers, but these numbers…
