Star Wars Jedi Training
This past year has gone by so quickly. I am happy to finally start a new year, but the last tween program of the year helped to end the year on a happy note. For this program, my library put on a Star Wars holiday program for tweens. It was a huge success!
Preparation
As the month of December approached, my coworkers and I collaborated on some tween programming we could offer during the holidays. When we offer tween programming as a library, we always try to ask our participants what type of programming they would like to see in the future. Over the summer, the answer we got was unanimous- Star Wars.
Our vision for the program was simple. We wanted a place for tweens to go to celebrate their love of Star Wars and to meet other people with the same interests. We also wanted to show off our collection and encourage our Star Wars enthusiasts to check out Star Wars books and nonfiction literature on space.
Originally, we planned our program to be a glow themed dance that would give tweens an outlet for somewhere to go over their holiday break.
While brainstorming ideas, we discovered that our coworker’s husband taught Jedi Martial Arts and he was willing to come in for free to do a free Jedi training for the kids. This would include showing the kids how to use lightsabers along with some simple health tips such as managing your anger. This simple outreach contact changed the entire structure of our program.
The Program
Before the program began, we first gathered supplies. The only thing we needed for this program were glow sticks and balloons from the Dollar Tree and some cookies. Thankfully, our library already had a set of lightsabers made out of dollar pool noodles that we were able to use for this program. Since our outreach guest volunteered to this program for free, the cost of this program was less than $10.
On the day of the program we spent about an hour setting up. We placed Christmas lights around the room, spread out glow sticks around the room, blew up balloons, hung up donated Star Wars posters, and set out food.
After that, we gave our Jedi Martial Arts guest full control. He opened the program by discussing that it is important to manage your stress and anger with exercise. The kids did some jumping jacks, planks, and went over some basic breathing exercises.
Next, he then went through some simple movement that the tweens used to spar with the light sabers with. They gracefully moved up and down our auditorium for an hour.
After the participants completed Jedi training, they were invited to dance to music from the Star Wars soundtrack and complete trivia for a prize. It was a program that even Yoda would approve of, but it was only made possible with collaboration and outreach.
If you don't have access to someone that could do a free program from a Jedi Martial Arts Academy, have no fear. This could easily be substituted with a bubble machine and some pool noodle lightsabers. Tweens will be excited to meet other people that share their interest and will be excited to do activities that
For even more information on this program, please check out my ALSC blog post on things that I learned from this program.
Until Next time,
Pamela
