Nintendo Night

Last Friday, 32 teens came to our end-of-the-school-year Nintendo Night program.  We did two tournaments, plus had out my original NES.  Thanks to the teens who participated in the Random-A-Thon fundraiser, we had great prizes for the winners and soda for everyone.  Thanks also to David J., who added his Wii and controllers to the event.  We got through the tournaments in record time and actually had time for free play on both machines.  Amazing!

This time, the Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament was with teams rather than a four-player free-for-all.  So, people picked their teammate, then I randomly pitted them against each other.  It worked very well (although I was really hoping to see more of the Gaming Club members matched up in the first round!), and I'd definitely do it that way again.  The final match was between Morgan/Le and Conor/Ranier, with Morgan and Le emerging victorious!  They each got a $20 gift card to Game Stop.  All of the top four teams got candy for their efforts, which included Morgan/Le, Conor/Ranier, Tommy/James, and John E./David J.

Also, in our continuing efforts to change things up, we tried a Naruto Shippuden III tournament on the Wii.  This game has been popular at our weekly Gaming Club meetings.  Only 11 teens entered, which made me have to mess with the brackets a little.  We ended up with a three-way round-robin final among Dennis, Khalil, and David F.  Dennis was the winner, earning a $10 gift card to Game Stop.  All three of the finalists also got candy. 

We are not doing any tournaments this summer, but look for another Nintendo Night on the fall teen program calendar!

TAB Grads

On June 5, the Teen Advisory Board (TAB) met to celebrate our graduates, meet new members, and plan stuff for summer!  The TAB is an awesome group of 15 teens in grades 8 to 12 who plan and raise money for our programs at the library.  This year's graduates are Nitha, Kaitlyn, Christine, Christa, and Judy.  It's always hard to say good-bye to our amazing seniors, so I'm glad we still have you around for the summer!

 

We welcomed new members Billy, Amie, and Kimberly to the group, as well.  We need all the help we can get over the summer!  The TAB is working on several programs for the summer, including the Childhood Toy Movie Marathon, a murder mystery, and a multicultural food event.  If you want to join the TAB, applications will be available in August/September for the 2011-2012 school year.

All of the TAB grads

The silly picture

The totem picture...?

Members, old and new

Some of our younger members

Arwa came to visit us!!!  :)

Craft Closet Cleanout

Last Wednesday, 11 teens stopped in for our spring craft closet cleanout.  Some had to finish their decoupage from last week, while others worked on new projects.  People made duct tape crafts, decorated giant flip-flops, did sand art keychains, and made random things from my "make stuff" box of mismatched leftovers.  Everyone left with several things.

We have six weeks of outdoor crafts scheduled this summer, plus a craft closet cleanout in August.  Check the teen summer calendar!

 Decoupage is always chaotic!

Two people making random stuff, and one making an amazing duct tape wallet.  She used my entire new roll of tie-dye duct tape and had to improvise!  The wallet turned out amazingly cool.

Doctor Who Night!

Tonight, 12 fanatical teens showed up for our first-ever Doctor Who night!  I know literally nothing about Doctor Who, but some of our Teen Advisory Board members are devoted fans.  They planned a fun event, and all I had to do was bake cupcakes.  We had a costume contest, made papercraft TARDISes, watched clips of Doctor Who episodes old and new, had a cupcake-decorating contest, and worked on Jasmine's dishwasher-box TARDIS.   Kaitlyn won the costume contest, and Emily won the cupcake contest. They each got a $5 gift card to Dairy Queen.  Thanks to Jasmine, Emily, Maria, Kaitlyn, and Genni for their efforts to make this program happen!

There were a few things planned that we didn't get to do.  The laptop wasn't cooperating, but they wanted to show this video of all of the regenerations of Doctor Who.  I also found two fun trivia links:  Doctor Who Trivia Night and BBC's cult TV show quiz page.  And, we didn't get to discuss anything, such as favorite villains, favorite Doctors, or what people thought of the new season.  It makes me think we might have to do this again sometime!



2011 Book Grub Grads!

Today was our annual end-of-the-school-year Book Grub talkfest and graduation party!  Nearly the whole group showed up, plus Caitlin and Martha came to visit.  We have five members graduating this year:  Nitha, Jamie, Kaitlyn, Judy, and Christine.  I know I say this every year, but I can't believe they're going off to college and I will really miss them!! 

We didn't read a book this month, but did spend some time talking about the books we read this year, their sequels, books made into movies, and good stuff we've read recently.  Of course, we also heard the grads' plans for life after high school, and everyone's plans for the summer. 

 Some grads

 Nom nom nom

 What would you do for a Klondike bar?

 The semi-serious Book Grub picture

 And, of course, the silly picture

 Group hug!

 In height order...

 ...and in reverse!

Cuteness

Uno Tournament

Last Wednesday, 23 people showed up for our after-school Uno Tournament.  To make it more fun, everyone got to pick their group for the first rounds.  I mean, it's no fun if you can't compete with your friends, right?!  The first two winners from each table advanced to the semi-finals, and then the first two winners from the semi-finals advanced to the final round.  As people left the tournament, they could continue playing Uno or choose other board or card games.  (And, as usual, the Yu-Gi-Oh guys brought their own cards along.)  The final game was among Janae, Warren, Billy, and Zaynah. There had been much trash talking on Facebook, and Warren backed up his claims with victory!  He won candy and a $10 gift card to Wawa.  The other three finalists each got a card game, and everyone who played in the semi-finals got candy.  It was so much fun, we have to do it again sometime!

Spring DDR Day

Yesterday, 11 people showed up after school to play Dance Dance Revolution.  I had out decks of cards and board games for when people weren't dancing, and (of course) there was food.  After some time for free play, I ran a little tournament.  Ross was victorious, and won a $5 Dunkin Donuts gift card!  We won't do DDR again until the fall (no room in the summer schedule), so look for it then. 

Spring Pokemon Night

Last Friday, 26 teens showed up for Pokemon Night.  We showed the first Pokemon movie, hooked up the Nintendo64 to the TV to play Pokemon Snap, and used the Wii to play old GameCube Pokemon games.  Almost everyone brought their DS and Pokemon game (Black or White) for our tournament.  Because we had uneven brackets, we ended up with a three-way final.  John, Joseph, and Le all battled each other, and Le won two of the games.  Le earned a $25 gift card to Game Stop, while John (who won one game) got the second-place prize of a $10 gift card to Game Stop. 

Thanks to the participants in the Random-A-Thon Fundraiser this winter for providing the money to purchase prizes!  Additional thanks to David J., Le, and Sara for the use of their equipment and games at the event.  I appreciate your help!  We will probably try another Pokemon event in the fall, so keep it in mind.

It's the End of the World As We Know It: Dystopian Fiction Book Discussion

Last Wednesday, 10 teens showed up for the dystopian book discussion.  I pulled our library's books in that genre from the teen section, and they covered almost the whole table.  Dystopia really is the hot genre right now.  (Good-bye supernatural romance!)  We talked about what defines a dystopia, how it fits in with other genres, and the different kinds of dytopian books.  People talked about their favorite dystopian novels, which included Uglies, The Hunger Games, Unwind, and Gone.  We also discussed the issue of how much romance is appropriate in a dystopian novel.  We read this recent New York Times article, which raises some interesting thoughts about new books like Matched and Delirium, where romance drives the dystopian plot.  It was a great discussion, and a lot of people checked out books at the end. 

You can continue the discussion on The New York Times' website.  In their Room for Debate category, there is a whole section about dystopian teen books called The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction.  It has short articles (including ones by Scott Westerfeld and Maggie Stiefvater) from different viewpoints, plus you can add your comments!

Here's a list I put together of books for fans of The Hunger Games, which is mostly dystopian teen novels.  Want to read more?  Check out these lists from Wikipedia:

• Dystopian literature
• Dystopian comics
• Dystopian films

Urban Legends

On Wednesday, 10 people showed up for our after-school urban legends day.  Urban legends are stories that get passed around by people that are false or only partially true.  Sometimes a person will tell a story that happened to "a friend of my mom's" or "a girl down the street."  Other times, you hear a story in an email or text, or read something in a Facebook or Twitter post.  You should always be sceptical, because they're often urban legends!  If you want to know if a story you heard is real or fake, check out http://www.snopes.com/.  Another great way to tell is to try to find newspaper articles or news stories that back up the claim. 

At the program, we talked about urban legends we had heard, took a quiz, watched a few segments from Mythbusters, and wrote our own urban legends.  Each urban legend was created by randomly drawing a perpitrator, a victim, a location, and an object and weaving them into a story.  Here are a few of our own urban legends:

Urban Legend #1 by Kaitlyn and Alyssa
OK, oh my God, I read this crazy story in Seventeen magazine.  There was this really nice teacher/professor lady walking around the mall with her two-year-old toddler, shopping for a Christmas outfit.  And they were all minding their own business and stuff, right?  And then some crazy dangerous escaped criminal came up behind them, pointed a gun at the lady's head, and stole her kid's lollipop!  Then he, like, ran away!  The store clerk call the cops and they arrested him in the next town.  Turns out he was a serial lollipop stealer!  Insane, right?  But totally true.

Urban Legend #2 by Billy and Ashton
A pizza delivery guy stopped by a store to deliver a pizza and soda to Mark, a store clerk.  Mark went out to pay the pizza guy.  As the pizza guy drove away, Mark dropped the can of soda in the road.  The wheel of the pizza van drove right over the soda and the pressure made the can shoot right into Mark's head!  He was in a coma for six months and has a permanent indentation of a soda can on his forhead.  True story!

Urban Legend #3 by Taliah, Janae, and Blya
This really happened to my friend's cousin!  One day this innocent child was in a pet store and a nerdy computer whiz came in.  Since he was a nerd, he had a mini-stapler in his pocket.  It fell out of his pocket just as a dog escaped from its cage.  The dog thought it was a bone and picked it up with its mouth!  It ran over to the child while biting the stapler, and the dog accidentally stapled the child's ankle!! 

Book Swap and Inception

Apparently, I planted the idea of book swap deep enough into the minds of 27 teens that they all showed up last Wednesday, thinking it was their own idea.  OK, that's really just the plot of Inception, which is what we were watching while swapping.  Everyone was riveted, whether they had seen it before or not.  People even clapped at the end!  And, they managed to eat an entire six-pound bag of gummy bears, plus tons of pretzels and cheeseballs.  During the event, 39 books got swapped.  Deisy and Jhoanna brought in 12 books together, so they really benefited.  We'll do another book swap and movie this summer, so look for it on the schedule!

Yu-Gi-Oh Tournament

Last Friday, 14 teens came out for a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament at the library.  Most of them were from our Monday gaming club.  They were looking forward to it because they have been asking me to do a tournament all winter!  We did single elimination, with the earliest two losers making up a pair to give us an even 16 in the tournament.  Three older members of the gaming club (David, Tim, and Alex) acted as judges, which was really helpful to me since I don't play the game.  I kept track of the brackets while they solved disputes and monitored the times on the various matches.  Amazingly, we managed to get done by 8:30 (this is not always the case at our Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments).

This program was funded with money from our teen Random-A-Thon, so we had a $25 gift card to Target for the winner.  Plus, Le (a generous gaming club member) donated two rare cards, and each of the two top finishers got one.  The top four were Joseph, Mark, Nicholas, and Dave M., and they each got candy.  Joseph and Dave made it to the finals, and Dave was the overall winner.

Craft Closet Cleanout

Yesterday, 15 teens showed up for Craft Closet Cleanout!  This has become a regular event around here, where people get to make random leftover projects.  Some of the crafts are from recent events, but others are ancient history.  It's a lot of fun, and everyone goes home with something.  At this event people made:

• Painted bottle vases
• Jean leg autograph pillows (no-sew)
• Jean leg bolster pillows
• Robot keychains
• iPod cozies
• Stacked button earrings
• Denim dog toys
• Necktie belts
• Victorian valentines
• Soda tab bracelets

That's a lot of stuff!  If you missed it, there's another CCC coming up in the beginning of June.

Look what we made!

Series Book Discussion

Yesterday, five people showed up for our teen series book discussion.  The weather was dismal, so thanks to them for coming over!  We talked about all kinds of issues related to series books, and everyone had a lot of opinions.  One thing that kept coming up was disappointment with later volumes after really liking the beginning of a series.  The was true for trilogies (The Hunger Games) as well as longer series (Harry Potter).  But we all recommended some favorite series books, and several people checked out some new things to try.  Also, Owen was really glad to get his hands on the new Alex Rider book (Scorpia Rising) that just came out this week!

Looking for something new to read?  Here are some of our favorite series books:

• House of Night by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast (recommended by Edythe)
• The Luxe by Anna Godbersen (recommended by Teferi and Gretchen)
• Alex Rider by Anthony Horowitz (recommended by Owen)
• Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead (recommended by Edythe)
• Bloody Jack by L. A. Meyer (recommended by Judy and Gretchen)
• Mortal Instruments by Philip Pullman (recommended by Gretchen)
• Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan (recommended by Owen)

Bird Nesting Craft

On Wednesday, nine teens made bird nesting bags for their yards at our first spring program.  This is a fun and easy idea that you could do at home, even if you missed the event. 

How to do it:
1.  Take a mesh bag (like you get onions or potatoes in), and fill it with colorful bits of yarn, string, shredded paper, and/or cotton.  (You can even add hair...birds love how soft it is.) 
2.  Tie it shut.  Pull some of the bits out of the holes so the birds can grasp it easily.
3.  Hang it up on a tree or fence near your house.  (A location near a bird feeder or bird house will help you get some business.)
3.  Watch them take it to build their nests, then look around the neighborhood later to see which birds you helped!