Teen Librarian Archives: February 2020

February was a great month at work! I continue to learn new things each and every day. I’ve also gotten to know the people I work with much better and can say that I genuinely enjoy working with all of my co-workers 🙂

Let’s see what my month looked like…

*Teen Librarian Archives is a monthly feature where I’ll share my displays, passive programs, crafts, and my teen programming for the month.

February marked my 4th month as a Teen Librarian! It was a BUSY month for me. Not only did I have my regular programs, but I participated in two outside events, attended a conference, and took my writing club to a writing competition.

Love was in the air at my library this month. It was very easy to incorporate Valentine’s Day into my displays & passives.

One of my passives this month was titled “Love Your Library.” I asked patrons to tell us why they love their library by writing their responses on paper hearts. I am planning on taking some of these responses and using them for a library blog post.

I wrapped a few YA romance books for “Blind Date with a Book”. I also wrote a few key words & elements on the front to entice patrons to pick them up.

For my book display cart, I set up a Black History Month display with YA books by black authors, a shelf with YA romance novels, and a shelf with “anti-Valentine’s Day” books (books not centered around romance)

My first event of the month was an outreach event for our local at-risk teens program. I participated in the Real Money, Real World event. This event gave each teen a career & monthly salary at random. The teens then had to go around to different stations such as housing, food, childcare, clothing, etc. to budget their monthly salary.

Since I was the entertainment station, the teens had to come to me last. Not going to lie, I had to crush the dreams of the teens that only had a few hundred dollars left by the time they came to me. This was a very enlightening event for them.

My first in-house program of the month was my Teen Advisory Group. Each month we complete a service project, and this month we made fleece animal toys to donate to a local animal shelter. The animal shelter even sent a representative out to collect the donations and bring a furry friend to visit.

Next up, my most successful program was my Anti-Valentine’s Day Party. We made anti-valentines, decorated sugar cookies with black icing, defaced celebrities, and watched the movie 10 Things I Hate About You.

I had a full house of 19 teens! They had a blast.

I do want to note that I did receive a bit of negative attention for this event. Some older individuals online felt that I was promoting hate by throwing an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party… Looking back, maybe if I had titled it an “Un-Valentine’s Day Party,” maybe I wouldn’t have received the criticism.

In February I also got the chance to sub for the Children’s Librarian again and do baby story time. I absolutely love when I get to do story times! It just so happens that the photographer for our library system came to take pictures of the event… and I somehow made the front page of a local newspaper? Must have been a slow news day 🙂

Somewhere in the mix I also helped out with my local intermediate school’s book fair… and no, I don’t even have a child in that particular building, but somehow I got suckered into it. Below is the front display case we made for the jungle themed book fair. No, this is not exactly library related, but I was proud of this display, so I decided to include it.

My second outside event was a STEAM night for our local middle school. I attended this event to promote our library system’s makerspace & our circulating STEAM kits. The turn out for this event was great!

Towards the end of February, I attended my first library related conference! This conference was all about providing library programming and services to teens. I found it very helpful to connect with other teen librarians in Ohio, and got lots of new ideas!

I finished out my month by taking my high school writing club to a writing competition! They didn’t place as high as they have in past years, but we did have one writer place 8th. The top 15 writers in each division are recognized & guaranteed a place at the state competition. The top 50% of writers that competed in the competition earn a spot at state. Four out of my five writers earned a chance to compete at state 🙂