Showing posts with label summer programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label summer programs. Show all posts

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Teen Craft Program: Melted Crayon Art

I'm a lover of Pinterest and use it heavily for teen program ideas. I've seen these crayon art pieces and have longed to try it. Doesn't this look cool?

Pin from Pinterest that got me excited about the project

It fits in with the science summer theme, so I jumped at the chance to host it.

I had a great response - 9 teens, which is a really good turnout for me.
Everyone seemed to have a good time and left with some cool art work.

Some of the teens glued the crayons on the canvas directly but the majority glued them to cardboard and held that above the canvas, letting the colors drip down. 

The Good: 
It's creative, fun, and lets teens play.

The Bad: 
It's messy - Stay away from the walls
I only had 2 hair dryers - wax from the crayons got on both of them.
I tried using an embossing heat tool - it worked well for one but then started smoking.

What I would do differently:
1. More Hairdryers. So I thought we would have another station. No one really seemed to mind waiting.
2. Away from the walls and more newspapers everywhere: the program took an hour and then the clean up started. Even though I put down newspapers, the wax got everywhere.
3. I would have a volunteer help me with holding the cardboard above the canvas, as you really need two hands for that and one hand for the hair dryer.
4. Buy more canvas - I only had 10 and I was really nervous about having to turn someone away, Luckily that didn't happen, but I would have hated to do that.

Here's one of the art works. You can see more on the video I made for the library.


The Verdict: I can't wait to make my own creations and I would do it again at the library in a heartbeat.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Summer Planning: STEAM movies

In trying to plan summer movies, I become frustrated. The release dates don't allow for lots of advance planning for new releases. But I did want to add one to the mix of STEAM movies and some TV shows. So I created a list. Some of these you can use in multiple categories, but I just used them once. 

Science:
Iron Man
Avengers
Gravity
Spiderman
Big Bang Theory (TV show)
Jurassic Park
Prometheus
Despicible Me
Bones (TV show)
Apollo 13

Technology
Terminator
Transformers
Real Steel
Eagle Eye
Her
Social Network
Die Hard 4
Tron
Matrix
Skyfall
Minority Report

Engineering:
Paycheck
Aviator
October Sky
Primer

Art:
Mona Lisa's Smile
City of Bones
She's All That
Black Swan
Titanic
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pans
Frida
Girl with a Pearl Earring

Math:
Beautiful Mind
Mean Girls
Good Will Hunting
Moneyball
Stand and Deliver

I'm going to show Real Steel and do a short Brushbots which a YA Librarian friend of mine Kristi shared at a round table meeting - making it a Watch and Learn program.