 Good morning everyone. Good morning to everyone in this room and all of those viewing from Lincoln and I think there's one person in Hastings and those of you viewing from your desk. I'd like to welcome each and every one of you to the paraprofessional spring meeting this year. However, we did something a little bit different this year. We, considering our team-themed presentations, we've teamed up this year with both the skip section and the YART section to present today's program, Growing Your Teens. My name is Cynthia Vana. I'm the Adult Services Specialist at the Miller Branch Library and I'm also the 2014 Chair of the Paraprofessional Section. Michelle Bullock, Chair of the Skip Section, sends her regards to you. She had a conflict today, a family member in surgery. She wishes she could have been here, but she sends her regrets and her regards. Who's the Chair of the YART section? Does anybody know? On behalf of the Paraprofessional Section, the Skip Section and the YART sections, thank you for attending today's meeting. On behalf of all of us, we're very glad you're here today and you will not be disappointed. If you're not a member of one of these sections, please consider joining. Today, we have almost 40 attendees from across the state. Schools and libraries are represented. We're all here because of our passion for libraries. I would also like to thank Connie Hagridorn, our spring meeting chair, for doing a fabulous job and working so smart for planning this event today. If you're watching with multiple people via webinar, please take a moment right now to type in all of your names so that we can make sure you all get your appropriate CE credit. We've got three great sessions lined up for you today and I know that you'll not only enjoy them, but you'll also take away great things that you can take back to your jobs. Each session runs approximately 50 minutes. This one will run a little bit shorter since we got a later start waiting for people to show up. And there'll be about a 10-minute break between sessions. You can ask questions after each session. And now let's get started. Starting off today's event was going to be Mary Ringendore you probably saw in the publicity material from Keen Memorial Library in Fremont. And she was indeed prepared to inspire your creativity by sharing some really cool and engaging craft ideas for teens. However, due to some extenuating circumstances, she couldn't be here today. But in her stead, not to fear, is Laura England Biggs, the youth services librarian at Keen Memorial Library. And she is equally talented and excited to inspire you today. Let's welcome Laura. Okay. Oh wow. That's weird seeing yourself down in the corner. Hi everybody. As Cynthia said, I am Laura England Biggs. My background is mostly administration until the last three, almost four years, I fell into youth services and found that not only do I love it, I have an inner crafter. So I've kind of been discovering some of that along the way. One of my favorite things that I've done so far, it's a, I think Guildcraft is where I got this. It's just a card that says dream. And then I kept all kinds of greeting cards and just cut them out. We also did an interpretation of Starry Night by Van Gogh. Not sure how successful it was. I had to explain to people what it was. But that's okay. And that's just, that's my little mixed media version of crafting. Mary, some of you may know, is an incredibly talented artist. So I don't even pretend to do half of what she does. She can do duct tape wallets. I can do duct tape Chinese finger puzzles. Let's just see. I put this together last night. Sorry. It's pretty basic. What I've learned that surprised me is that crafts are not just for girls. A lot of the guys, if you get them in the right space, they want to play with this stuff too. They want to express their creativity. Now, it may not look quite as girly. It might have a little blood and guts on it. But it's okay because that's what they need to do to express themselves. Let's see. This was two years ago for summer. We had all these little cardboard boxes and wooden stars. You've got all this stuff hiding somewhere either in your closet or somewhere else's. So we got, what was it, tempera paint and glitter and stickers and little goo goo eyes. And we created a ladybug box and ornament. Some of them they painted dream big. Some of them they tried to make really beautiful paisley and it turned into a big glob. But they loved it. You can use sharpies. You can use beads of any kind. We found it buttons. Does anybody have a big old container of buttons lying around at home? Buttons are great for jewelry. You can do something that's really planned and organized. Or they can just string together whatever strange conglomeration they want. Like this one. It's just randomly picking them up off the table, putting them together. It's just that stretchy stuff. Tie a couple of knots in it. If you really don't want it to go anywhere, drop a super glue on the knot. Works really well. You can also do memory wire, which is pretty cheap and just makes these wonderful little spirals. This one's a pretty planned design. But again, you can just do random beads going on. I haven't done earrings and that kind of thing just because bracelets are so much easier. You can also use paper crafts. I had the good fortune there's a friend of mine in Fremont who knows how to fold cranes, has been folding them for, I think, almost 40 years. She showed me really quickly. I made up this step-by-step instruction. Start by folding it in quarters, then you move along. I can take pictures and put this on later. Then it goes into the final two phases of your crane. What you end up with is, if you remember which way it opens, it's got a little head and a little tail. I've got a bunch of them here. Again, I'll take pictures and add them to the PowerPoint. I didn't do that last night when I got home from work at 10. But you can use, this one's done with, I believe, wrapping paper. You can use magazines. Everybody has a few old magazines lying around when you're getting ready to recycle them. You can actually use origami paper if you get it. Copy paper doesn't work so well unless you're doing something simple like a butterfly, which is just some accordion folds and a chenille stem, pipe cleaner. We've also done little plastic globes where they can paint on them. Usually it's better if you paint the inside and then you can mark her on the outside. Whatever you have on hand, they can find something to do with it I've learned, whether or not you want them to. Origami cranes already showed you that. If you have the step-by-step instructions labeled, you can almost do what I've seen other people talking about, which is a DIY or do-it-yourself table. Then you don't even have to be there because you could write verbal instructions. You could have, if you've got maybe a kindle or a digital frame, you could have a looping video talking them through it, and then you wouldn't even have to be there. Games are probably what I'm going to talk most about because that's what I'm most familiar with doing with our teens. The craft thing works in the summer, but during the year, they don't want to do that. They want to play games. They love, love, love zombie dice. I'm not sure why all of them are familiar with the Walking Dead. It sort of worries me, but I think I have a better chance of surviving the apocalypse if they're on my side. Zombie dice comes with little dice that have a brain and a gunshot and little escaping footprints. There are red dice, which are the hard dice. They're mostly gunshots. There are yellow dice, which are two of each. Then there are the green dice, which are mostly running away footsteps. What you do is take three dice at random, roll them. If it's a gunshot or a brain, you have to keep it. If it's running away footsteps, you can roll it again. So if I get one of each, I would pick up my footsteps, go back here, pick out two more dice, roll them. You get three gunshots. You lose your turn. You lose all the brains. So a lot of times, if you hit five or six brains, it's time to stop. But if you've got all red brains out, then your green brains are still in there, and those are easier to get. If you've got all green brains, you might stop earlier. It's a lot of strategy for them to learn. The goal is to win 15, to collect 15 brains. You can keep track of it with poker chips, with pennies, with whatever. I, however, have a husband who has OCD. He made up these wonderful little cards for us. We have one brain, and they are encased in sleeves, like you would see on Magic the Gathering kind of cards. And then you can trade that out for a five. Trying to get it so the glare is not so bad. And we even have a 10. There are expansions for zombie dice, so that you have the prom queen and the drive-in action hero. They can save each other if the prom queen's brain is up, and you roll the action hero's runaway feet. He saves her from the zombies. There's a Santa die. You could get two brains that are present. It's not Santa's brain. They're very clear about that. You can get a helmet that allows you to withstand more gunshot or an energy drink that, oh, I forget what the energy drink does. We haven't done that person in a while. As you can see, zombie dice, it's unlimited number of players. That's what I really like about it. People can come in anytime. A lot of games are tied to two to four, two to six, even two to eight. We've had a consistent group of three, maybe four kids for six months. I laid down the law to them a month ago because my boss laid down the law to me and said, three kids, you can't both be in there anymore. You and Mary have got to get more people. So I said to the kids, hey, do you want to keep doing this? If you do, you need to bring your friends because otherwise, I'm not sure how long I can keep doing this every week. Next week, we had 13 kids. We've had 13, 11, 9, 11, 13, 11, 11, kind of all over the map since I laid down the law. Maybe it was two months ago, actually. They go for the games, even though we have Wii, sports, and Indiana Jones on the Wii. We have Mario Kart. We have Rock Band. We have Dance Revolution. They're incredibly old. They still play them once in a while, but they go for the games first. The newest one we've gotten is Bucket O'Bacon. It is like a barrel of monkeys, little pieces of bacon, and you mix them up, toss them on the table. Your goal is to collect a string of bacon. When you drop a bacon, you stop. You get to count that many. The goal here is, I believe, again, you collect 15. There's also a Bucket O'Mustaches. I still don't get the mustache thing, if anyone can explain it to me. But I know they love it. And then you can also mix them and make it Bucket O'Mustaches bacon because they hook together differently. The bacon is balanced a little better, but the mustaches are fun. So these were maybe eight bucks at Hastings. I bought them. They're mine, but I let the library use them. And that's mostly because I have a gamer for a husband. We do so much gaming. It's not even funny. Yesterday, they actually went straight for Word on the Street. I've taken to where I let them set up all the electronics. If I try and guess what they're going to want to play, it doesn't work. They never want what I have set up. So they unhook everything, and then it takes an extra 10 minutes. They went straight for Word on the Street this time. It's a very simple word game. Let's see if I can get the picture up here for you guys. The board is laid out like a little street. You have little tiles for the letters. There's no vowels, no J, no Q. Those are a little too difficult to think of words. What you're doing is getting a category out of the little box. Maybe yesterday it was something a player is wearing. And you try to think of words that use as many letters as possible. One word. It could be hyphenated. So like if the word was, if the clue was, actresses who've won an Academy Award, you could say Zeta-Jones. And then you just move the letters one side or the other of the board. So it's a team game. They can kind of do some collaborative thinking. And once you move it three spaces to your side, you capture that tile. Then you have to start thinking of words with some of the more obscure letters like Z, Z. Does anybody really know a word that has V, Z, and W in it? Because those are usually the last ones left. The goal is to capture eight tiles to win. So there's a lot of back and forth. You can do it in teams, guys against girls, or just have them pick at random. Usually ours go guys against girls. Usually the girls win. What can I say? It also could be that the girls have played it longer. This is one I haven't played with them yet. It's called Zoro T-S-U-R-O. It's a tile game where you have a board laid out in a grid and everybody gets a little character and then you get little cards that have different patterns on them. As you lay the patterns out, they all match up and take you somewhere. Every card matches up to something on every other card. The goal is to move across the board without being led off the board. And if you're playing with one or two people, it's not too bad. If you've got all eight people, there's a lot of collisions and once you collide, you're out. Or you can force someone to go where you want them to go, which might be off the board. And it's a good one for up to eight. It plays really fast that way. It's also a lot of fun for them to kind of, whoa, I don't like this pattern. I don't like this pattern. No, this isn't any good. Again, with the strategy. Finally, I think the girls' favorite game, other than song bursts, 70s and 80s, which shocks me. They weren't even born when those songs were written, although they do better in the 80s than they do the 70s. And half the time, they just want to be on my team because I know the songs and I usually win. So I've started saying, I'm your DJ. I'm not going to play anymore. It's not fair. But they also love Dixit. This is one my brother actually got me for Christmas. It has a series of different picture cards on it. Everybody gets seven cards. You look at your picture and you decide, I think I can make a story out of that. And your story could be one word, could be a sentence, it could be a sound effect. We've got one here. Oh, which one is it? This one here, it's like a knife in the grass. Usually somebody says, oh, I know, I know, I have a story. And then you have to look at your cards and see which card you have that might tell that story as well. Everybody pitches a card in. The person who made up the story turns the cards over and numbers them. Everybody else guesses which one was the original card. And you get scored points that way. Some of the pictures, it is really hard to tell a story. And I've had to work with the girls not to be quite so literal because there's a braid with a gold ring around it. And they forever want to say, one ring to rule them all. Everybody guesses that one. Although we did have, one guy apparently has never read the books, never seen the movies, had no clue. We were shocked. It was like, dang, what? It was a little crazy. Yesterday they were actually setting up dominoes while we were kind of waiting around, which surprised me. There's a couple of them over here playing solitaire. We haven't had anybody doing chess yet, but there is a big chess club in town. So I would love to see that kind of come in. Talked a little bit about our video games. It's not just the guys who love these things. The girls are over there fighting for controllers for Mario Kart. Even though it's like, they look at it and go, that's like the old one. Give me that. Okay, and I keep telling them, give me a list of what you think I need to get. I will get it for you. They didn't believe me. I said, tell me what you want for snacks. Oh yeah, we won't have anything. They wanted ho-ho's. They wanted oreos. They wanted gummy bears. We already give them popcorn. They came back next time and we had Swiss rolls because they're cheaper than ho-ho's. We actually did buy real oreos. We will never do that again because the locusts are small. We will get the hydrox and the gummy bears. We did the cheap version and just dumped them in a bowl. They didn't know. And they just looked at me like, what? Really? You're going to give us all this sugar? Not every week, but I'll send you home. Our best drummer is probably Katie. I think she's in the middle school this year. The guys all want to get in there and she just goes, get out of the way. She takes over because the guys are failing out on rock band and she just sails right through. It's pretty amazing. One that is, I call it a self-started program. We have some kids who meet out in our west lobby that like to play Magic the Gathering. If you've never heard of it, sometimes it looks like this. This is also known as Obsession because this is my box that I carry my Magic the Gathering things in. I made it out of an old gateway box and some contact paper and old foil packs of cards that I laminated. When I go to the tournaments, the guys, the 17, 18, 25-year-olds, always look at me and go, cool box. I think Nancy, you used to work with us. Were they out there when you were there? Yes, they had just started. It's been a year, year and a half, two years, something like that. Magic the Gathering is a collectible card game. It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons on cards. You have to roll dice to make things happen. There are characters like Plains, Walkers. This one is Chandra, a genie. I can't really see it very well. There are sorceries. There are instants. There are enchantments. Basically somebody, in a traditional game, you're battling one other person. You each have 20 life. You're trying to attack them and take their life while gaining some, if you can. They're trying to do the same. You can inflict injury upon their creatures. You can find their creatures so they can't fight. You can blow everything up and start over. We had a group of kids just start gathering out there, and people looked at us and said, are you going to let that happen? I walked out and said, yeah, I sure am. What are you guys playing? When are you going? You got the core set? You going out to the new release party? And they just went, what? I said, yeah. I pulled up a Plainswalker last release, and they just went, you know what that is? I've actually taken some decks in and played with them a couple of times, and they love it because they usually beat me, because they really play nasty. A Plainswalker is kind of an elevated creature. Normally, the creatures have a power and a toughness, so they can do so much damage and sustain so much damage. Plainswalkers like having a second person sitting beside you. They usually have a special ability you can do once a turn, and if you get so many counters on them, you can take so many off later, and sometimes that's how you win the game. You can use the Plainswalker to block so that your damage doesn't come to you, but to them, it's way complicated. My husband's been playing for like 20 years, and he doesn't even really understand Plainswalkers yet, because he didn't get one. I got one. It's true. So it's kind of been expanding a little bit. We had a group of kids come to us and ask us if they could do a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, and they have a Yu-Gi-Oh card game, but they were actually doing a video game. They brought in their own equipment, their own snacks. I think they had upwards of 25 kids in that room, and yeah, okay, it got a little noisy. You know what? We have the Win It Back Tea Party in there, and they get a little noisy. We have the Elkhorn Value Rifle Association, and they get a little noisy. They were so incredibly respectful. They cleaned up the room better than most of my other groups do. I just kept checking in on them once in a while. I know they were expecting me to say, shut up, and all I said was, wow, great turnout. Do you need anything? And I said, come back, please, and make sure it's a Saturday at work. So it was just, it's really kind of taking off, and hopefully we can get an actual formal magic to gathering going, because a lot of the kids want to learn, but they're afraid they don't know how to break into that little group. So maybe if we could sort of host it officially, that would help. Common threads, no matter what we're doing, everybody knows, feed them and they will come. Microwave popcorn is cheap. They love movie theater better. It vacuums off the tile floor pretty easily. We don't have carpet, so I'm very lucky. We use the house brand of Crystal Light Fruit Punch. I really don't recommend it, because it does stain just about everything it lands on. If you can get them onto raspberry lemonade, which is what I'm planning to transfer them to, it's much easier to clean up. I always let them choose what to play. And I remind them that at five minutes till, it's cleanup time. Miss Laura is not doing this alone. Miss Laura is going to dinner at five o'clock. And so you're going to help me. You're going to put away chairs. I've taught them how they stack. And they actually start policing themselves and going, come on guys, we only have a couple more minutes. And then it's just, it's about fun. Every once in a while they get a little rowdy. So we'll close the door. And that's about all I have. I would be happy to put together a list of any of this stuff, just because I had to throw this together. I don't have it in the PowerPoint. Okay. Okay. The age of our group, our teens, we actually have primarily 13 to 18. I've got a couple of tweens that are coming. They aren't as regular. And I'm looking at trying to break off a tween gaming group in the summer, just because it's hard for them. They want to be there hanging with the older kids. But when Kendrick brought his, whichever, PS3, whatever we don't have, he brought his machine in and hooked it up to our computer, brought a couple of games that were rated T and rated M and Ms. Laura said, no, no, no. Plants versus zombies would be good. And so he very graciously played plants versus zombies with one of the little guys. But, yeah. So they get really bored because the teens don't want to hang out with little guys. And the little guys want to do whatever the teens are doing, but they don't understand the in-jokes. And there's problems with it. So I would recommend splitting it out. I know that's what most of the classes I've been to have recommended. We just didn't have the numbers until now to be able to justify two programs. Actually, the question is why crafts during the year and then gaming during the summer. It's actually, what my experience has been, is they like to craft in the summer when they're not in school. And then during school, they have so much homework and stuff, they want to blow off steam. They don't want to follow directions in terms of, like, fold this, do that. They're more interested in the social aspects. So that's why we do more gaming and crafting during the school year. Anybody else? Not yet. I'm working towards that. Because I've seen a lot of other folks talking about... Oh, sorry. The question was, are my crafts passive programming, where I just lay out folders of instructions and let people come in? The answer is it's not yet, but I'm working towards it. I've seen a lot of other people talking about it, and it seems like a really good way to go to get that involvement, get somebody doing something without having to man it, or submit all the time. All right. Thank you. Thank you.