March 11, 2024: Crafternoon

Supervisor:  Renee Kirchner

Monday:  1pm-6pm

Today I helped with a Spring Break kickoff craft program- Crafternoon.  Ashley and Alyssa ran the event and I helped with set up and take down as well as counting attendance.  I’m developing mad clicker skills!  The program was designed as a come and go, self directed family event.  Five craft stations were set up with 6 different crafts:  paper bag kite decorating, popsicle animal creation, coloring station, paper bag leprechaun puppet; pipe cleaner animals, and pipe cleaner bracelets.  Just as with the Family Craft Night, each table had printed instructions and an example of the craft.  However, for this event, the supplies for each craft was on the craft table itself rather than a central supply table.  I personally, like the central supply table for organization but that would not have been as efficient for this craft event.  Efficiency was key with this event as over 70 kids and 55 adults attended!  Ashley and Alyssa planned the event for about a week.  Planning consisted of brainstorming craft ideas, actually trying to create the selected crafts, gathering supplies, and creating signage and instructions.  I did notice however, that they did not plan the set up ahead of time.  We decided on the spot how to arrange the tables and how to distribute supplies.  This seemed to create a little chaos during set up!  Eventually, the station design was agreed upon and supplies were put out.  Ashley and Alyssa decided to forgo chairs, unlike Family Craft Night, as they did not want to invite patrons to linger overlong.  At first, I was not sure that was a good idea but the volume of people was significantly higher today (Spring Break) than at the monthly Family Craft Night, so it was probably a good decision.  It was interesting to see the difference in execution for essentially the same program and how dependent on expected attendance that execution was.  Scaling up changes the whole dynamic!

I endcapped my day with check ins with Renee.  We discussed my observations from Adult Services Day and ended with a plan to brainstorm some passive programming ideas specifically for Preschoolers and Tweens.  Adult Services (AS) was a very interesting area because it is so very different in feel from the children’s area.  It is much quieter in AS; so much so, staff can do collection development from the info desk!