I cannot bear waste, so I’m always seeking ways to use up the last little bits of things – for example, little nubs of sidewalk chalk too small to draw with. Over school vacation week, my handy 9yo assistant happily picked all the small bits of chalk out of the bin and bashed them up (carefully) with a hammer. (She separated the chalk by color into different bags and crushed them on a piece of cardboard outside.) I funneled the colored chalk into separate containers, and waited for good weather…which arrived today! After story time, I mixed the powdered chalk with water in bowls, and we went outside to the library patio for some chalk painting. It was great fun! There’s still plenty of chalk left, so we may do this at STEAM as well later this summer.
Now that I’ve reduced STEAM time for kids ages 5-11 to a manageable frequency (twice a month instead of every week), it’s been going great. Here are some of the activities we’ve done since the program began in January:
- Robot Turtles board game
- Spot It! card game
- Creating and decoding messages with Caesar ciphers
- Penny boats (supplies: aluminum foil, watertight bins, water, about $5 in pennies)
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Word scrambles
- Building block challenges with big and regular-size Jenga blocks
- Primary color painting
- 3D paper snowflakes (supplies: paper, stapler/tape, scissors, yarn or ribbon)
- Make Your Own Board Game
- “Stained glass” luminaria (supplies: old honey or jam jars, tealights, colored tissue paper, mod-podge, brushes)
- Make Your Own Tangrams (supplies: cereal boxes, Tangram template, markers/crayons, scissors, glue). This is one of my favorites, because of the way it combines art and math; I’m looking forward to doing tessellations later.
- Scattergories Jr.
- Origami bookmark corners
- Wildflower seed bombs (supplies: clay, compost, seeds; egg cartons to transport them home)
Sometimes, we start STEAM with a book to introduce the topic, or to use as a reference during our activity. For example:
- Mix It Up! by Herve Tullet (for primary color painting)
- The Science of Seafaring by Anne Rooney, Big Book of Science Experiments (2011), Alpha Bravo Charlie by Sara Gillingham (for penny boats)
- Maker Comics: Design A Game! by Bree Wolf (for make your own board game)
- Math Lab for Kids by Rebecca Rapoport and Highlights Tangrams (for Tangrams)
- Yoko’s Paper Cranes by Rosemary Wells (for origami bookmarks)
- Wintergarden by Janet Fox and Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner (for seed bombs)
In general, this has been a fairly easy, low-budget program to run. I keep a running list of ideas, books, and materials in a google doc, and use a lot of recyclable materials (like cereal boxes or honey jars) or ones we already have (like paint and paint brushes), or share new supplies with teen programs (teens made seed bombs too).
Guest presenters occasionally lend their expertise: in early spring, an author from Northeast Wildlife visited to teach about animal tracks, scat, and food sources (lots of animals each acorns!). This summer, our regional health nurse is bringing UV bead bracelets to emphasize the importance of sun protection, and one of our library trustees, who is also a master quilter, is going to lead a session on hand-sewing and help us make a small quilt we can hang in the library. So, we’re STEAMing along!
I decided our February book club would be the last one until summer, when I would run it again for a new group of rising K/1st graders. No one showed up for the program…but, there were plenty of kids and adults in the children’s room, so I invited them all in for a storytime instead. We read the same two books – Arihhonni David’s The Good Game and Who Will Win? – and used the coloring sheets I’d printed (a flying squirrel and a bat, characters in The Good Game), I just sprinkled in a few songs and rhymes as well: “Open Shut Them,” “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” and 
Three of the younger kids started with Robot Turtles, and the others began making codes for each other to decipher. I gave a basic explanation about how to use the Caesar cipher (or shift cipher), then helped the kids get Robot Turtles set up, then helped the ones who were having trouble figuring out the ciphers. (I think one thing that tripped them up initially was the letter-letter correspondence, rather than letter-number correspondence; the only number you need with this kind of cipher is the “shift,”; it’s not an A=1, B=2 kind of code.) But eventually, everyone figured it out, and then they could swap ciphered messages to decipher!
In the next few weeks, we’ll have a building challenge with blocks (we have both regular and life-size Jenga), a puzzle challenge (a 36-piece jigsaw with the picture showing, then upside down), penny boats, Snap Circuits, primary color painting (think Mix It Up!), and more. What STEAM activities do you like to do with kids?
The kids’ graphic novel book club I started last fall is still going strong, with about 4-7 kids attending each month. This month we read Lucky Scramble by Peter Raymundo, about a kid named Tyler who goes to a Rubik’s cube competition. Our icebreaker question was “What’s your favorite kind of puzzle?” and a lot of the kids said “Rubik’s cube,” even though none of us could solve one. (I said word puzzles, like wordle, and it turns out all of the kids also do the NYT puzzles!)
Last, the kids voted on which book to read next. The choices were Curveball by Pablo Cartaya, Pebble & Wren by Chris Hallbeck, and Puzzled by Pan Cooke. The first two got one vote each and Puzzled got two votes, so that will be our February book – but all three books got checked out. It was a good afternoon!
Passive programming, or self-directed programming, is a type of program that library patrons can participate in independently or with only minimal interaction with library staff. This recent 
Jenny Arch 