How do you get tweens into the library?
The answer is simple: know what they are interested in.
Sometimes their interests overlap with the young adults and grade school, but more then often they do not. Tweens are their own special group. If their interests are the same as the one of the other groups, the activities prepared maybe too hard or too simple. It is important to keep up with their fandoms and have the program tailored especially to them.
To keep up with these fandoms, I try to establish relationships with my tweens who come in with reference help.
This is how I created my first program. One of regulars was telling me about how wonderful My Little Pony is. I am a child of the 90s, and I instantly grabbed onto this new fandom (....& I am still hooked!).
So came.....
My Little Pony : Friendships is Magic Extravaganza
When I advertised this program, I marketed to both tweens and young adults. Even though I had a large age range, I am happy to say that I got more tweens. I had about 35 tweens show up. I work in a larger library, but this was still a great number! We normally only got about 10 for programming. It seems that having that special time made a difference.
For this program, I decided to set up stations. I have found that this age group like a free flowing format. I also like it this way to encourage participants to meet new people and share their fandom.
The stations I had set up were:
1. Vote on your favorite pony
This worked out well, but I forgot to put Pinkie Pie on the voting list. My kids called me out on it! She of course won the "best pony" award. If I did this program again, I would make sure to have all of the ponies, and I would have someone to count the votes for me. Too many kids!
2. Perler Beads
I have a ton of excess perler beads. I decided to pull them out and let the kids make My Little Pony designs out of them. Patterns of My Little Pony characters are available for free online. I printed some off for this station, but I also encouraged the kids to make their own.
*Tween You and Me Tip*
Make the patterns to the right size
If you do decide to use these patterns make sure they are to the right size. I printed off a few and the kids could not use them. This is a great excuse to play with some of your materials to make sure they work.
Have help for this station
I had help with this station, and I was very grateful! This turned out to be one of the most popular stations. As the kids made their designs, one of my coworkers stood on standby and ironed their creations for them.
3. Friendship is Magic bracelet station
Since we are talking about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I could not do a program without friendship bracelets. I knew different ages would attend, so I printed out instructions with different levels of difficulty. I thought this would be a station that the older kids would enjoy, but I found that the young tweens (age 8 & 9) tend to like this station best. Even though I meant this station to be for the older tweens, it did end up being a successful station. Many did not have time to finish, so I had ziplock backs and take home directions ready for them.
4. What's your cutie mark?
For this station, I printed out a simple personality test for the tweens to take. In the show, a cutie mark is a mark you are given when you find out what you are meant to do. I thought this would be a nice way to weave this into my program. Having quizzes out is always a success. Finding out who you are is after all a need for this age group. My only problem I had with this station, is that I put out one that was too complicated. Many kids flocked to it as they came into the door, but they did not understand the directions on the one I put out. If I did this again, I would make it more age appropriate or make my own.
I allowed the participants to do the stations for about 30 minutes. After that time was up, we ended the program with a bang....we played trivia. I am a fan of the show. I rewatched it, and came up with about 30 questions. I had the kids break up into teams based on who their favorite pony was. This was the most successful part of the program.
If anyone would like to repeat this program, please let me know. I'd be happy to share my trivia questions.
At the end of the trivia, I gave the winning team My Little Pony stickers.
Before the participants left, they made My Little Pony masks. It was a huge hit, and it helped to circulate My Little Pony materials the library had, and I even saw a few new friendships begin.
This program marked my first tween program. Having this special program just for tweens helped to establish my tween programming I used this summer. I will blog about this on a later day, but I am happy I finally blogged about this. I am behind!
What kind of tween programming are you doing at your library?
