Teen Read Week
Teen Read Week (TRW) is bearing down upon us, Oct 15-21, and I thought it might be a good time to start talking about it. This year’s theme is “Get Active @ Your Library.” This week is a great time to let the young adults in your community know that the library can be a fun place and better yet, that reading can be fun. It is also a time for the young adult services to step to the forefront of your library and show the rest of the community what you do.
So, what do I do for TRW? This is the question that many librarians ask themselves when they first start thinking about TRW. What I am proposing is that we use this blog as a place to share our ideas for TRW this year. I will explain what I plan on doing for TRW but it would be nice to hear what everyone else is doing as well. So, if you email me (jberns89@gmail.com) with a short description of what you are doing for TRW, programs, school visits, contests, etc… I will post them on the blog. For those of you out there having librarians block you can simply look to this blog over the next week or two for some good ideas.
I guess I will get us started. This year another librarian and I are making a school visit and hosting a fun program. We will be visiting the local high school and talking to the all of the freshman classes about the library. We plan to encourage them to get library cards and to tell them about all our library has to offer, from databases to video games, or books to movies. Of course, because this week is about teen reading we will be doing some booktalks. We plan on booktalking a few books from Yalsa’s 2006 Top 10 Best Books list including Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways Vol. 1: Pride and Joy and John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Finally we will give them all a coupon they can bring to the library to receive a free book. Free books will most likely include the above mentioned books as well as some other well known titles like Uglies, Airborn, and a few others.
In addition to the school visit we will be
hosting an event at the library to tie in with the theme, “Get Active @ Your Library”. We will be hosting a video game night with the game Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix. Dance Dance Revolution games are very physical experiences and the thought is that this would be a very fun and attractive way to “get active”. Not to mention, showing some adults that gaming can be a social and active experience is always a good thing.
So there are two ideas for all of you, now its your turn to let me know what you are doing. Email me at jberns89@gmail.com with a paragraph or two about what you are doing and I will try and post a few ideas every couple of days as I get them. If you want me to post your email or other info about you so people can contact you with questions about the programs let me know. I will try to post a first name and library for each person if it is given to me.
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For teen Read week we are setting up a teen information table. It will have information about library events that we offer teens. We will also provide surveys that teens can fill out to enter a raffle. The grand prize for the raffle is a basket of new teen fiction and a cheif’s hat (our local football team).
We will also stash candy in the basket.
The survey will help us gain some information about our teens, such as information about their interests and what they do in their spare time.
Each day we also have an event going on.
Mondays is always Got Game Mondays
Tuesday will be a Teen Advisory Board information session, added into the week for TRW.
Wednesdays is always Teen Screen Movies.
Thursday will be an added in Dance Dance Revolution Program.
Friday will be the day we do our drawing for the winner.
Just thought I would let you all know how the program mentioned above went. I just got back from the Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix night at our library and it was a lot of fun. We had about 15 people there, which for the size of my library when a program is only limited to teens is a fair amount. Anyway, they all loved the game and loved the seemingly endless amount of pizza, cookies, and pop. The best part is that they loved playing with us. For each game that we had set up some of them wanted to challenge us on it. Not only would they challenge us, but they would talk trash the whole time, even if we had beaten them in it the last few times we played them.
We had a projector set up with DDR as well as a second Gamecube set up on a TV with a few other game options like Tony Hawk (skateboarding game), Mariokart, and Super Smash Bros Melee(cartoon fighting game). The nice thing about the smaller number of teens is that with two systems going at once there was very little wait time for them to play. The only problem that I found was that having a bunch of kids playing a very active game makes for a very sweaty and smelly room if you don’t have some windows open. So, take my advice, open the windows and bring in a fan otherwise the library might start to smell like your local gym really quick.
We just had a successful Teen Read Week at our high school’s library. Each day, we had a new theme to highlight a different way to “get active.” Monday was mental challenges with board games and puzzles. Tuesday was physical fitness with a “mini-olypmics” style relay race, combining mental and physical tests. Wednesday was school and community involvement day. We displayed posters created by various schools clubs and had an interactive mural students could write on to thank teachers and staff for helping them be active in school. After school on Wed, we also had a karaoke / poetry slam contest (turnout- 20 students). Thursday was recreational- we had a scavenger hunt that involved the library catalog, our databases, and some sillier questions (What book is Homer Simpson reading in our “Read, Man” poster?… answer: TV World.) On Friday, we had an open mic where students could read their own poetry, favorite poem, or favorite literary passage or quote. We also “interviewed” tables with the mic, asking students what their favorite activity was for teen read week and if teen read week will inspire them to read more! Overall, it was a blast and students really seemed to look forward to coming into the media center all week to find out what the day’s featured activity would be.
[…] weeks events. If you haven’t already read them feel free to go back and look at the ideas in the original post and updates #1, #2, and #3, and stay tuned for more […]
[…] Here are a few more of the wonderful TRW ideas, which some of you have sent in to me. If you haven’t read the original post that started this off check it out here. […]