 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you are unable to join us on a Wednesday, that's fine. We record the show every week, and it is then posted to our website, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access the archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to the state library elsewhere. And so we provide services to all types of libraries. So you'll find things on Encompass Live for anybody and everybody. Public libraries, K-12, universities, colleges, correctional facilities, museums, basically our only criteria is something that is a library, something, and something that libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing, cool services and products to share. It runs the gamut, anything and everything. We do a mixture of things here on the show. Book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. And we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do presentations for services or programs or things we offer here through the Library Commission. But we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. With me today is Janine Hill. Good morning, Janine. Good morning, everybody. She is the Library Director at Jensen Memorial Library in Minden, Nebraska. And she is going to be talking about their team nights, their after-hours programs, some really cool and fun things they've been doing there. I've been hearing a lot about this presentation. She's done it multiple times over the past year or so, I think, in different meetings you've had across the year. Yeah, about a year. Okay, yeah. And so there's some great ideas in here. And you can see here on her first starting slide here is a link to the presentation and activities. That will be links to that. If you don't worry about trying to scribble that down everything right now, that's fine. And we're also, when the archive goes up afterwards, we will have those links, those hot links right on the same page where the link to the recording is and links to all of that. And we'll have access to everything after today's show. But I'll just hand it over to you. You just need to take it away and tell us about all the fun, easy, and inexpensive things. Astrics. Astrics that you guys have been doing. I was just going to say, you'll notice that I put a little asterisk beside that because as Chris has said, this presentation, I've done it several times over the last about year and a half. And it has become its own little monster. And so it has required me to do some additions and changes. And some of that even includes stuff that may not be what some people would consider inexpensive. So we'll go through and I'll give you some ideas of like Chris just said, some of the stuff we've done, other ideas that I've gotten in places I've been or presentations I've seen. I completely believe in resource sharing. So I would say 75% of this is not original by any means, shape or form. So please feel free to use any information I've given you, adapt it however you want. I won't be offended, not like I'll know anyway for most of you because I saw where people are from and a lot of you are from Nebraska anyway. But I would love to see if you do such a program or you change it up or whatever. I'd love for you to share that with me too because it might give me a better idea of how to do it. So, okay, so we'll get started. So like Chris just said, the links are on that first page there. I also have a Pinterest page where I try to save stuff that might be of interest for teen nights and that might relate to this presentation too. You'll notice on there I put the name of my youth services person. He's not able to be with me this morning, my youth services person and my tech person right now are doing a green screen program. So I'll be interested to see how that went. So, first of all, I'll start with getting back to my slides as well, dude. Okay, so when we think of teenagers here, we go by grades rather than ages mainly because if we go by grades, then that gives them the same kids that they hang out with in school. If we go by grades, there might be a 12-year-old that's in sixth grade. There might be a 12-year-old in eighth grade and that kind of messes up the dynamic a little bit. So, we just strictly by grades. And I also put in there that we have also started doing some preteen nights and those are for fourth through sixth graders. And in all honesty, I feel they're a little bit more challenging because those kids aren't as self-aware and don't listen as well just because they're not as mature, I guess. Not that seventh graders are always mature, but whatever. So when I'm talking about stuff, when I'm talking about teens, I'm talking about seventh through twelfth graders. So the majority of our kids are usually probably, I would say our average is probably freshman because we have some that are older, some that are younger. We had teen nights, I have to look at my calendar, two weeks ago, yeah, just two weeks ago, we had our teen night. And we had going into senior high school all the way through, going into seventh grade. So it's a very diverse group of kids. So this picture that you're looking at is from about two and a half years ago. So these kids are all much older now. But some of these kids, I would say probably five or six of the kids in this group are still amongst our core teen attendees. So, okay, when I talk about fun, go ahead, Krista. They keep coming back. So that's a good sign. I hope so. So when I was saying we have fun, I try to make it something that they'll be interested in. And we are not above stopping in the middle of something. If they're not having fun, if they look like they're bored out of their minds, which happens, we will stop and do something else. I have no problem doing that. I have no problem admitting that a program was a fail. So it's just a learn and move on. We started out having a teen advisory group, but it did not work because kids were a town of about 3,000. And so our kids were so involved with so many other things that we just couldn't find a time where the ones that were interested were able to come. So we started just including that as part of our teen nights. We just kind of meet with them for maybe 10 minutes at some point during the night, pick their brains and get an idea of what they are interested in. If there's a book we need to get or whatever might be on their minds and we go from there. When I say easy, I try to say that some of the activities take literally like no prep work, especially if you're sharing resources with somebody else in using their program. I'm really bad about making it overly complicated for myself, so I'm sure some people can make it easier than I've even made it. And then inexpensive, for the actual activities, I try to keep it for $20 or less. Now, our food costs of course make it a lot more, but for the actual activities with $20, we can do a lot. So that's usually my aim. And for food, we do pizza most of the time because that's what they love, but we've also done a variety of other things for food. So of course, food is very important when you deal with teens. Any time you talk to somebody who deals, does teen programming, if you don't already know, food is like the number one thing. Okay. So we do ours once a month on either Friday or Saturday night after the library closes. So generally six to nine o'clock at night. And we do that every month with the teenagers. With the pre-teens, we usually do only every other month just because they're very overwhelming. And they're still kind of learning how to function in that setting. So we just do that one every other month. But we work diligently around the school schedule. Of course, sometimes it still doesn't work, and they change things or forget to put things on the calendar. But we're very adamant to make sure that it doesn't interfere with anything major going on at school. We do require registration and usually at least two days before the event, I'll fudge some, you know, like day before if we have room. We take a parent phone number strictly so that if something happens, we can make sure we get a hold of them. For example, last summer, when the nights that we were supposed to have a teen night, we were in a tornado warning. So we decided that we probably didn't want to do it that night. So that phone number is very important for us. And we don't require permission slips, except for our once a year overnight lock-in. And I'll talk about that a little bit more later on. This is our general layout. We give them time to hang out and have fun. We do lock the doors, especially if we're going to stay inside, which most of our stuff we do stay strictly inside. During the summer, it's a little bit different. We try to go outside during the summer. Like last time, this past time, we had water games. And so obviously we were outside for that. But otherwise we try to lock the doors once everybody gets here, not only for making sure that people don't just wander in, but also making sure the kids don't wander out. Because once they're here, they have to stay here unless they get parental permission to leave. Or we kick them out. And in that case, we also call parents. Then we take time to do our structure activity. They like to kind of do their own thing for a little while, like sardines, which if you don't know what that is, I'll explain that one too. And then unlock the doors a little bit early so parents can come in and then make sure everybody's gone by 9 or shortly thereafter. And like I said, once you're in, you can't leave. If you leave, you're not allowed to come back in. And if they do leave, we call a parent to make sure the parent knows that they're leaving. Even if they're 16 and they drove themselves, we still call the parent to tell them that they left. We are very adamant about being kind of respectful, no bullying. We have to, every time we have new attendees, we have to really enforce the no bullying policy. And staff is in charge. When staff asks you to do something, you need to do it. If you have questions, we would like you to ask us and talk to us in a civilized manner. And when we ask you to, we give you directions, we expect you to follow them. This is especially hard with the younger kids until they learn kind of what our boundaries are and what our parameters are. One of our other things we're very adamant about is cleaning up after yourself. We usually don't move from one activity to the next until we've cleaned up. So we don't go on to our first major activity until the food stuff is cleaned up and whatever the progression is and it works out usually pretty well, especially after they've been here a couple of times, they understand what the protocol is, what the expectation is, and they're good about cleaning up after themselves. So, and then of course the number one rule, which I was number four, but the number one rule is to really have fun. Like I said, we have to be really flexible with our activities. Sometimes stuff really does not work out and it might be the structure of the activity you thought would be great, isn't? And it might just be the dynamic of the kids. We have found that there are certain kids when there's two or three kids when they're not here, some things don't work and that's because they're really good about including other kids. So you just kind of gotta get a feel of the room and if it's not working, move on to something else because then the kids are no longer having fun. And we always have that alternative activity. I was way over planned. For example, like our overnight, it's a 12 hour lock-in thing. I have so many things planned that we will never ever get to, but that's okay because then if something's not working, we can move on to something else. We always have extras planned. So our ultimate alternative activity is to let them play tag in the library. So that always is a good, is a hit. So within this presentation, I did like a cost legend to give you an idea of how much things are gonna possibly cost you. And you can kind of see how that works from there. So more dollar signs, more stuff. Okay, so I have this whole legend of all the different kinds of activities and I'm gonna kind of flip through a bunch of them really quick since we're not in a, when I've done this presentation in the past, when we've been in a room, I let people kind of raise their hands and make sure I talk about something for sure, but I'm just gonna kind of flip through a few things because some things are pretty self-explanatory. Some things are not. So here we go. If there's anything anybody wants to hear about specifically that you don't mention, let us know and I'll make sure we cover that one. Absolutely, yeah. Send us a chat message if there's something, if there's something you have a question about, you're wanting more information out, please let me know. I can stop and talk however long I need to. Okay, so obviously cardboard games are pretty self-explanatory. We've done it in a tournament atmosphere. We've done it just as a free play, kind of however it works. Our regional system here has giant games, so we borrowed those from them a couple of times. Like the decks of playing cards are literally like this big and the kids loved doing that and they taught each other poker, which I had mixed feelings about, but it was fun. And we've done Giant Twister. I have a super-sized Twister game. We've done Giant Jenga, Giant Chess, a bunch of that kind of stuff and of course they always have fun doing that. Let's see. Bookshelf tag is something that kids made up and we just were doing something one night and they started running around and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on? And they said, we're playing Bookshelf tag. I'm like, what's Bookshelf tag? They're like, well, it's tag through the bookshelf. So I was like, okay, have fun. But we do have two rules. One is that everybody knows who's it and we try not to pick on anyone in particular. And then two is that either have to have their shoes on or they have to have socks and shoes off because we have found at least on our carpet that socks can get pretty slick. So there ends up being slippage and luckily the kid that slipped and fell into our DVD cases was my youth services son, so I wasn't worried about him. Yeah, there's a little safety factor there too but they have a great time and listen, even the 18 year olds have a great time playing tag within the library just because they can run and be loud and have fun. Yeah, this is the one time where the no running in the library rule is probably not in effect. Absolutely, it's always funny. The first time kids will come to team night they're like, oh my gosh, we're being so loud in the library. I was like, the quiet rule doesn't apply, the no running rule doesn't apply but only for these three hours once a month. And so they really enjoy that. Okay, pair races are just, we just happened to have wheelie chairs. All of them are chairs in the library or wheelie chairs. So they were able to push each other around or they were playing, we had two boys last month. One is going to be a senior in high school, the other one's going to be a sophomore in high school and then the other boy is the younger brother who's going to be a eighth grader. And they were riding around in the chairs and there was a girl sitting in front of them and she was like the rowboat leader and then the boys were like pretending like they were rowing boats. It was, they made their own fun sometimes, it's great. Sorry Deans, for those of you who haven't heard of this is basically reverse hide-and-go-seek and this is my kid's absolute favorite game and it not only here but the two previous positions I've been in, always a huge hit, they love playing it. One person hides, everybody else tries to find them and hide in the same place with them. Our building is less than 4,000 square feet and that includes mechanical rooms and everything and our kids still inevitably will find new places to hide almost every time, it's amazing to me. And they hide in the same places and they still can't find each other. So it's a really fun game, they enjoy it. It was also gonna kick out of when there's, it was usually a girl, when there's like a really short and small little girl, she could always find like in a cabinet or something. Probably one of the smallest places, yeah. Yes, the only place that's off, we only have two off-limits places. One is our mechanical room that has the air conditioners and stuff in it and the other one is my office and the main reason my office is off-limits is because there's lots of personal information, the files and all the money and stuff are in my office. So that's why it's off-limits. But the bigger, when I was in a previous job I was at, our building was like 17,000 square feet. Oh my gosh, it was chaos and awesomeness the whole night. So, excuse me. And of course there's charades which is pretty self-explanatory. I usually will let the kids, I've learned that the kids need to write their own cards because if I write them, nothing I say is cool. So they have to write their own cards. Like the day I gave up writing the charades cards on the day when I had a Britney Spears card and somebody described her as, you know that blonde girl that shaved her head, the old one, I was like, oh my gosh. Oh dear. Okay. To them she is kind of old but that was when I was like, okay, you guys get to write them not me. So, Truth or Dare cards, I made my own Truth or Dare cards. I literally took a dollar, well two $1 sets of playing cards, printed off on labels, a bunch of dares and truths that were appropriate for teens and preteens and put the labels on the cards and made us decks of Truth or Dare cards. It was really easy. One of our, like our Truth one is blue and our Dare one is green or something like that. So it was really easy and really fun and they had a great time doing it. So, and of course there's always crafts you can do. Clean out the craft closet and have a craft night. We've never done like a bad art night but there's bad art. You can have them create and see who makes the worst work of art and have them judge it, you know, whatever. One thing we did purchase that we continued to refill is a rainbow loom which makes like bracelets and keychains and a bunch of other stuff. It's little tiny rubber bands and it comes with a little loom thing. Look it up on Amazon Oriental Trading, you can find them. And that's a hit for our teenagers and almost every other program we have. If the girls especially get bored, they'll be like, can I get the rainbow loom out? I'm like, sure, that's fine. So, and if you catch the bands on clearance from Oriental Trading, they can be like a dollar for like a thousand rubber bands. So it can be pretty awesome sales there a lot, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the clearance is wonderful. I think my initial investment, like I said, was maybe like $20, $30. And then it's maybe, I don't know, $10 a year I spend to keep up with bands. So it's pretty, it's a good deal. There's always karaoke. We've just done it with a computer and speaker and let them kind of go crazy. YouTube has lots of karaoke channels. You can also do Spotify playlists or iTunes. I think in my folder that Krista will post, there is a link to, oh no, that's another game, nevermind, I'll give you to that later. Yeah, I would, one thing I did learn, I would restrict what songs they can use though because you wanna make sure they're not doing songs that would be offensive, as in lots of F-bombs and that kind of stuff. So that would be my only restriction. We have tons of Legos here and a lot of laborings have lots of Legos. Teenagers like building Legos just as much as eight-year-olds. So you could do all Lego night. And adults, yes, adults like doing Legos too. And just get all the Legos out and let them go crazy. And our kids didn't do this, but I went to another presentation and they said that their kids collaboratively ended up making like a small castle out of their Legos. And so I thought that was a pretty cool idea for some of them to do. We did this one a few months ago, a taste test challenge where you can do like the generic brand versus the name brand. One thing I did learn is that kids don't necessarily know what generic brand means. So like I will say like the store brand, sometimes they're not even sure what that means. So I'm just like, well, just tell me which one you think is better, cheaper or more expensive one. So they try each thing, not knowing what is what, and then they vote on which one they liked better, A or B. And then you see what they liked better. And if they knew what it actually was, like if they knew that it was Dr. Pepper versus whatever the Dollar General brand is, Mr. I don't know if or something, yeah. Yeah, something weird. So they, I think our pre-teens enjoyed this a lot more than our teenagers did quite honestly, but the teenagers just liked the fact that they got food. So I was like, the gift ball is, this is an expensive one. It can be very, it can be expensive. It can be really cheap if you can get stuff donated. But this is what we do during our overnight. And honestly, my family did this for Christmas too. I was hearing about this, yeah, family, yeah. Yeah. If you look up on Pinterest, there's tons of different ideas of how to do it. You just get a bunch of small prizes and stuff, gifts or whatever, put them together, start with something, probably something more expensive in the middle and then start wrapping Saran wrap around it. And then after a couple of wraps, you add something else and keep wrapping and keep wrapping. One of my suggestions is that you do a certain amount and then you tear it and start it from a different spot. And then that way it takes, it's not just like, they can just keep on rolling it all at once. They have to actually stop and undo it once more. Buy the next part, yeah. Yeah, so then for them to be able to unwrap it, you kind of do it like a hot potato kind of thing. They, our kids sit around in a big circle and one kid has the ball that they're trying to unwrap. The next kid has a pair of die and they keep rolling the die until they get a pair matching so they two twos or whatever. And then when they get a pair, then it moves to the next kid and so on and so forth. So of course at the end of the thing, I always make sure everybody has at least one or two things because I always include little stuff like gumballs and whatever was left over from summer reading and that kind of stuff. So it's a great way to use up all of those miscellaneous prizes or Halloween trinkets or whatever that you have in the closet. This popcorn face game we need to do again because it is hilarious and so much fun. You get small groups and have one kid who is the one that's going to be the popcorn face and then the rest of the kids will throw stuff at them and they cover their face and we did shaving cream. I have a caveat about that, but we did shaving cream and then they can throw, we did popcorn because we had it leftover from a movie program, but throw popcorn at their face and give them however long your set time is and whoever has the most, whatever team got the most on their face then wins whatever the prize might be a candy bar or something. You could also use cotton balls, you could use Cheetos, you could use anything that's- I think it'll stick, yeah. Yeah, light and will stick. It won't hurt me. What's that, Krista? It won't hurt anybody when it hits, yeah, too. Yes, yeah and make sure your popcorn doesn't have holes in it for that exact reason. We used shaving cream and it was the menthol kind and we realized that kids don't realize that it's supposed to have a little bit of a burning sensation, so they were a little freaked out by that. So my advice would be to use like whipped cream and that would have the same effect. So- And if you want to keep whatever stuck to their face, it's safe. Yeah. It shouts girls but you know, they'll eat anything as you did. Well, and somebody suggested even using frosting, I was like, well, that would actually be pretty good, especially if you use cotton balls, so. But it was so funny and hilarious. My other piece of advice is make sure your tarp is ginormous or you do it outside. These are the ways you're gonna have lots of vacuuming. Yeah, because I can even see in that picture that a lot of the stuff has missed the tarp. Yeah, there was lots of popcorn all over the floor. Luckily our vacuum cleaner worked really well. Okay, there's name that tune, which is a good, is a really good one. My favorite is to do either a Spotify playlist, which we've done like movie theme songs with. I love Spotify if you haven't noticed. Or there is, this is the one where in your folder, there's a link to a Disney name that tune on YouTube. So they have two or three different versions of Disney name that tune. Name that tune on YouTube. I'm just gonna push the button and go. So that's pretty awesome. Absolutely no work, no time, no cost. It was great. We did, so we have two different kinds of buzzers. One, oh, if I pull the batteries on, I would show you our buzzers. We have like little buzzers that are like a cow and a chicken and that kind of stuff. So those are fun. Or we just do, we have a water bottle that we filled with rice and glued it and taped it shut. And that's our thing that we use to, so they can answer. So we have, they face off one against the other. Whoever grabs the rice bottle first gets to answer. So that was really pretty easy too. So that one is literally, can be an absolute no cost program. It's great. KSF Hot Potato is one of our other absolute favorite games we play every year at our walk-in. We procured clothes and as you can see in the picture, necklaces and hats and masks and whatever else from our house, from staff houses that they were willing to give up. I went to our local thrift shop and bought like a gigantic black trash bag full of stuff. And she actually didn't even charge me for it because I said it was for the library. She was like, oh, just take it. But even so, you know, like maybe five, 10 bucks. And then you have it for forever or however long. But you got to make sure you get a couple of good, funny pairs of shoes too, because those are the best, especially when the boys get them. But this was, it's a real hit and they love it. And we put all this stuff in a big black trash bag, put in the middle of the circle, play the music like Hot Potato, and they throw a beach ball back and forth while the music's playing. Whoever has the beach ball when the music stops has to pull something blindly out of the trash bag and put it on. And it is hilarious and it's great. And we lost, if you notice in the picture, the orange-brown robe that we have, we call that the Hugh Hefner robe. So it's awesome. Okay, this trash bag fashion show came out of one of our Truth or Dare challenges, which was to take a trash bag and make it into an outfit. And the girls said it was terrific and hilarious. And then this whole trash bag fashion show thing came out of it. So it was great. I gave them like 20 minutes to create something with their trash bag. And I even gave them some rope and some yarn and stickers and that kind of stuff. The second time we did it, I did that. So they could decorate it up however they wanted to. And then after when their time was up, we played some music in the background while they did a little fashion show through the library. And then our library staff, our three staff that we have that work got to judge and see who was, we gave out prizes to everybody, like best walk, most creative, best face, you know, all that kind of stuff. So it was hilarious and so much fun and so easy. And the trash bags were our only costs. And you could use cheap and expensive trash bags. Ski ball, I haven't done yet, but I've seen other people have and I really want to. I just need to make sure I find enough boxes to do it. But you just create yourself a little ski ball ramp out of cardboard and duct tape and then use some foam balls or ball pit balls or whatever you got and, you know, make a couple of lanes if you want to or just make one lane and see how much they can add up to, you can have a little tournament. This is another one you can kind of look up on Pinterest and get different ideas, but it's really cool. I'm not an engineer, so the engineering part seems a little daunting to me, but I'm sure once I started it, it would work out okay, but I think it's a lot of work. That's really creative. I would have never thought, I mean, making your own ski ball, because that's one of my thoughts to do and I go to one of the, yeah, I'm using it. I know, yeah. It's one of my favorite games too, so I'm excited to try it finally. It's on my list for this fall. Okay, and then we have mini golf, which we've done a couple of times and I'm sure most of you have seen mini golf some way, shape, or form that libraries have done, just using stuff around the library, book-ins, books, spare shelves. We have carpet squares we use for story time. That's their tee-off point for each hole. And then we use, if you notice in the picture, I use book-ins and turn them so that the long side is up and that's the hole. So this is once again, the only thing is you have to find putters, which we bought a pack of like rubber-erised plastic putters that we've used several times for several things. Excuse me. So we made that one-time investment and then we bought some foam golf balls. But if you are in a community where there's a golf, mini golf place, they very likely will let you borrow them. If you're gonna do it inside, I wouldn't use real golf balls. I've done that before. It can be a little dangerous, especially if you have a small space. So the foam golf balls are preferable. Even your local golf club might be willing to let you borrow some putters or whatever for the night. Or if you have a local library like me who will let you borrow them, we can do that too. Yeah, that was a good one. It takes a while to set it up, but if you do it yourself. But I had somebody suggest to me that they did groups where the kids, like they did groups of two or three and each group got to set up a hole or two holes or whatever it was. So the kids set up the holes and then they got to play after that, which I also thought was a great idea because that would take more time too. And fill your whole night. So that was really good. There's always trivia. I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory. I've used, we do once a month adult trivia. So I've used the adult questions with the teenagers and they think it's terrific when they know more than the adults did. So that's awesome. But they love doing trivia just as much as anybody else. We've done an escape room before. It was partially, I adjusted it partially. We did it, I bought, this was before our regional system bought their own. And now I can go through my regional system and get them. Which at least in Nebraska, I think most of regional systems have some or at least a couple. Yeah, the escape room, the breakout boxes. Yeah, the breakout EDU boxes. Yeah, breakout EDU is the one that I think is most popular, but there's other companies out there too. But breakout EDU is more, can be more education and library based. So they kind of understand the spatial constrictions and that kind of stuff. So it works out pretty well. But, and we did it in our library. We didn't technically have like a sealed off, you know, room or whatever we did each section. We kind of did a different part of the library and it worked out just fine. So it was a lot of fun. I had to give a lot more hints that I'd hoped to but that's okay, it worked out. Of course, there's always a movie night. Make sure you have a license, which we're lucky in the state of Nebraska that the state covers that movie license for us. Otherwise, if you have movies in your library and it's covered by your license, this could be a no cost event if you don't provide snacks. I mean, easy peasy. As long as you have a projector and stuff, obviously. We have partnered with our local opera house and they have given us popcorn because they have a nice popcorn machine. We've done microwave popcorn. My favorite though is at least in the Midwest, we have our high V chain of grocery stores and they have bags of popcorn. I'm not sure how much it contains but they're like three feet, four feet tall. Yes, a gigantic long guess. Yes, yes. And it's like 15 bucks. And a peep popcorn and can last forever. And yeah, I love those big bags from high V, they're awesome. And it's good stuff. We've done minute to win it more than once and this is super popular even though the show hasn't been on TV for like five years, the kids still know what it is and they still like playing the minute to win at games. And there are oodles of ideas for games online. So if you're interested in doing minute to win it, I encourage you to Google minute to win at games. There'll be YouTube videos, there's Pinterest ideas, all sorts of stuff. And you can make it as simple or as extravagant as you want but the three things that you can do a lot of games with are ping pong balls, red solo cups and oh my gosh, what was the other one? I can't remember now. But just ping pong balls and red solo cups, you can do tons of games. Oh, balloons, balloons is the other one. Balloons, red solo cups and ping pong balls and you can probably do two dozen games with just those three pieces. So it's a really fun night and it's easy to get lots of different games and lots of stuff to do. We've got- Which it seems like the teens and the tweens like something that doesn't like just in the same thing for hours and hours, yeah. Yeah, anything where they can get up and move around every couple of minutes is yeah, be active because if they have to sit there for more than like five or 10 minutes, they start getting bored. And so yeah, anything active, they love it. I'm obsessed with Hollywood game night and a lot of people don't know what it is but if you don't know, it's a game show-esque game show. That's on NBC and it actually, I think the new season starts this week or next week, next week. It's hosted by Jane Lynch. You can look it up online. They have teams of four, which we've done teams of 10 at the most. And there's just little mini games. It's kind of similar to minute to win it but not. You do lots of little mini games within the big game and each little mini game has a certain number of points they can earn and then whoever has the most cumulative points at the end of the night, that team wins or whatever. So you'll notice that some of the games have pretty interesting names like serial killer and no harm, no vowel. No harm, no vowel is one of our favorite ones. That one, you can take whatever it is. Like we've done movie titles and you take out all the vowels and then you try to figure out what it is spelling without the vowels in it. There is an example of that game in the folder. So please look at that one. It's great. This tie-dye, which is what we're doing at the end of this month. I bought this actual box that's on the picture. I bought that box of tulip dyes. And I, oh, I said right there, $20. There we go. I did that one. You could buy the t-shirts for the kids if you want to or just make them bring their own shirts or whatever you want to tie-dye. And then just have a little tie-dye party. And with the tulip ones like this, the best part about it is there's no, you don't have to like re-soak it. You don't have to let it set. You just make the dye with the water and the powder and put it on the shirt and then undo the shirt and let it set to dry. That's all there is to it. So I really like that. Last summer we did the balloon breaking with tie-dye, which was a lot of fun, but we realized that underwear also gets dyed. And so that was pretty funny when parents were like, yeah, the undergarment stage color too. Now they have some very creative underwear. Okay. Yes. So it's, the balloon breaking is a little tedious to get it set up, but they had a great time doing it. So we have an duct tape polusa, which is basically a bunch of games and activities that are centered around duct tape. We did where they had to balance duct tape on their hands, where they had to have races with duct tape on their head, where they had rolling duct tape. So they had to take the roll of duct tape and see who could roll it farthest in a straight line. If you look all of the names of these games up, you can find them online and it will tell you more about them. Our favorite one is the top picture there. We called it Roomba, duct tape Roomba. And I took a bunch of old card catalog cards and just threw them out all over the floor. Each team then assigned or decided on one person who would be their Roomba. And that person got rolled in duct tape with the sticky side out from just below their elbows to their waist. And then they rolled on the floor to see how many cards they could pick up. And it was hilarious and fun. And they had a blast and we'll totally do it again because it was so much fun. And for crafts and things, I know with duct tape, I've seen in like the hardware stores and Walmart, whatever, there are so many different patterns now and colors of duct tape. I mean, you say, great, yeah, for certain things it doesn't matter, but for doing craft and things. Oh yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah, if you go to Walmart, their duct tape display is like, huge. It's big as my desk. It's huge. Duct tape may get a little expensive, but if you can work with your local hardware store or like Home Depot and Minards like to donate things when they can, then you can get it. And the gray duct tape, you can get really cheap at like Dollar General or whatever your dollar store is. So that's my advice. Video games, we have a Wii. And we also, I have a Wii. And my tech services person, Josiah, he has a Nintendo Switch and we usually will bring both of them. The kids can play it. We'll use it as a starting thing at the beginning of the night, kind of as the time filler. We've done it as the main program. During our overnights, we kind of just have it up. They can do it. We've done Super Smash tournaments, Super Smash Brothers tournaments. We've done Mario Kart tournaments. We've done like the dance dance, the just dance games as tournaments and as just free plays, a little bit of everything you can do with it. And even if the kids aren't gamers, they can still find something. Like if you have like, we use Wii Sports Resort a lot because they always like to get some baseball. So anybody can take part in that. So those are pretty easy and good to put up there. And if you don't have much for games, if you go online, you can get used games for like $2 for super cheap, especially for the Wii, but any games. And like if, and if you have somebody who has access to the Xbox, then they can, you can download games offline or play them online or whatever you wanna do. So my one piece of advice would be not to use ones where they have to get online and be interactive with other people just for safety purposes. Of course, there's Fear Factor, which is a good October-esque program. We did, of course, like Slimy Spaghetti. We bought these rubber rats and they have to like pick the rats up with their elbows and throw them into a can. And we've had, oh gosh, I don't even remember. But lots of, oh, baby food tasting, which was gross, but it was awesome because it's funny which ones they find out they like. And I see that you see more silly things, like on the show, it's like they're having them eat things like crops and worms and, you know, horrible, horrifying things. You wouldn't wanna do that. So one thing somebody else told me they had their kids try was, and it's, I think it's a little gross, but I mean, it's totally normal, like pickled eggs or something that they normally wouldn't have access to. They're totally a food, it's a normal food thing, but yes, probably haven't had it. It's a normal food, but it's still a little, but yeah, things that they may not normally have access to and have them eat, you know, try those things. It's great. We've also done like where they had to like, hold a ice cube and hold it until it melted or see who could hold it the longest. And so that was pretty entertaining too. Okay, outdoor water game, like I said, we've used to this a couple of weeks ago. We do water balloons and let them bring their water guns if they have one. We, you know, do cup races, kind of whatever you can think of that uses water. We've done, we did dodgeball, tag. We were gonna do the baseball kind of thing, but they weren't into that, so we just skip that one. But of course, make sure that they all know to wear clothes that they can get wet in. And some of them wore their swimsuits and that was fine as long as it was not showing too much skin, that was fine. The, they are a tiny bit more expensive, but the self-sealing balloons, I now swear by them, the self-sealing balloons are a lifesaver. Making tons of them like for this kind of an event, yeah. Like I bought the cheaper imitation ones even, like I didn't buy the Buncho balloons, which is like the high-end brand. I bought the cheaper ones from Amazon and they worked just as well. And there were actually more of them in a box. And so like you could do 35 of them at one time and within 90 seconds you had 35 balloons done. It was great. So yeah, I completely recommend getting the self-sealing balloons. This game we just did not that long ago, did games based on the Price's Right TV show. Some of them didn't know what this show was. And it just reminds me how old I am sometimes, but. It's still on, right? It's still on, yeah, it's still on. If you look up the website there that I put the Price's Right, they have all of the games listed and how they work and all that kind of stuff and then you can just adapt them. And if you want to go on YouTube, like you could just literally show videos of the clips of the show and use the same prices that they're using and that kind of stuff. And I bought a couple of packs of Play Money and used that to give out and whoever had the most Play Money into the night won. And like I said, our kids really like to play sardines. So our big prize was that whoever won got to be the first one it for sardines. And that was a bigger prize than anything else I could have thought of. I could have given away a $50 iTunes card and they'd be like, no, I'd rather be it for sardines first. So it was really fun. Improv Night, it's kind of like charades, let them kind of decide. I put a website on there that I've used before that I think is a really good resource for improv games that are appropriate for teenagers and pretty easy to understand and do. This is when you're definitely gonna have to make sure they know what they're getting into before they sign up because of course there's gonna be kids that are too shy to do it. And you might also have an alternative. Like I said, if you have kids that aren't comfortable doing it, say, hey, you can be one of the judges, you can be the official timer, you can be the game selector, there can be other jobs for them rather than just being the performers. So you wanna make sure that everybody is included and there's a way for everybody to be included without feeling like they get up and make fun of themselves kind of thing. But a lot of kids that are like me are not good as good with off the cuff type things like this. It's just not, yeah. You could also be the prop, Krista. You could be the permanent prop. That's true, yeah. You didn't have to say anything, just yeah. Right. I have discovered that if teenage, if you can get like the older boys, like the sophomores junior boys to be goofy and stand up there and like help be inclusive, then everybody else is a lot more comfortable. If the boys are willing to do it, the old boys are willing to do it, then they're like, oh, it's not so bad. So I don't know, maybe that's just my community, but that's what works for us. Open mic nights, provide a stage and a microphone and maybe lighting if you need to. And really, that's all you have to do. You could have a coffee bar if you wanted to. You could have cookies and that kind of stuff, but really to run the program, all you need is a microphone and a stage and let it go. And yeah, it's pretty self-running. I would suggest that you do have some ground rules with cursing or insulting others or in this day and age, even political kind of things. You might wanna put the kibosh on that just so that nobody feels excluded kind of thing, whatever works for your library and your community, but it's a pretty, pretty easy program for the person running it other than just making sure that people show up. And then our big one, oh, I forgot that I'll go back to it. Our big one is the overnight lock-in. We have had it for three years now. Our kids ask about it continuously. I think I've had probably a dozen questions about it this summer. What do you have in the lock-in? I'm like, not until December. Oh. Is that what it usually is? Is it here at the same time? What's that? Is it usually the same time every year in the winter? Yes, it is the weekend between Christmas and New Year's every year. That way they're on break from school and it's a little bit easier for everybody to be here for 12-hour street. But we do seven to seven, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. We literally lock them in the library, lock all of our doors, make sure nobody can get in, nobody can get out, and over plan. Have, and I plan in, like food breaks, I put out new food like every hour and a half to two hours to make sure that they keep going. I try, we try to keep everybody awake as much as possible. It makes the time go faster, quite honestly, if everybody is awake and I'm doing things. Let them wear pajamas or whatever they wanna wear. Make sure there's music, make sure there's several activities kind of going on at once if you don't have one. Like if you're not playing name that tune, make sure there's several small activities going on to keep them busy. And this is one where we do have a permission form and it's a two-page permission form. So it includes like emergency numbers and foods they're allergic to and any other special health considerations and all of that kind of stuff. So all of our bases are covered. And that's something my board approved before we put it out there just cause that was a pretty important one because it is such a long period of time. And this one is, of course, quite a bit more expensive and that's part of the reason we only do it once a year. I have to tell the kids I only do it once a year cause I'm old and can't stay up for 12 hours overnight straight. And I actually usually staying up for about 36 hours straight and yeah, that is beyond. It takes, we joke, there's three of our staff that do it and we joke that it takes us two days to prep for it, one day to do it and two days to come down from it because we have to plan our sleep schedule. So- Yeah, I was wondering, do you try to adjust your sleep? We sleep during the day so that you can take it and be, you know, totally. Yeah, absolutely. My animals think I'm crazy cause I'm sleeping in the middle of the day but that's okay. I also, we also do, oh gosh, that made me think of something and now it's automatically gone out of my brain. I've already forgotten. I don't know. It must have not been that important. But this, our overnight lock-in issues. Oh, I know what it was. One thing we have changed for our lock-in this year is that they have to now, because we had a couple come last year that had never been any of our activities before. So they had no idea how to act. They didn't know the rules and it was a problem. So one of our new stipulations is you have to come to at least two other teen activities throughout the rest of the year to be able to come to the overnight lock-in. We are hoping that will help us with the behavior and all that kind of stuff and they know what to expect and they know what's coming and they're kind of familiar with each other by that time too. So I think that that is really important for us. I wanna go back really quick. I know we're getting to the end of time but I wanna go back really quick because I have one other thing. This is a true adventure mystery. Somebody else shared with me and this on here is a link to this. And it's literally a true adventure mystery party at the library and she has it all set up. She told me I could share it with whoever and I'm so excited. We haven't done it yet but you just choose your adventure and go through the library and answer these questions and the kids get to make up their own mystery party. So it is a lot of fun and it is already done for you. And the link to this is in the link that Jean said you'll have afterwards. Yep. Yeah, it's America, yeah. Yes, okay. So now that I've talked to everybody's ear off. You're good. Questions or anything? Yeah, all right. Does anybody have any questions? Type them into the questions section if you go to webinar interface. It is a little after 11, 1101 central time but we did start a little after 10 so that's not a problem. And it'll go as long as it takes if you guys have any questions or anything. Someone else does agree with you about not that having the teen advisory group has on its own has not been very effective. They do the same thing as you combining it with a teen night and get there in that way. Yeah, that having a whole separate meeting it just doesn't seem to get a spot. It's just too many things for them to try to put into their schedule and combining it on their one just seems to work better. So for these events and things I was wondering yet how many you've got a lot of kids at something especially the evening events or the lockout how many staff do you have to the number of kids for each of you? I automatically plan three staff. We could get away with two for most of it but it's my, I mean, I love my teenagers. I was a teen services person for almost 15 years and so I have to be at my teen events. I do my youth services person. I have her come because she's my youth services person and I have one other staff person come strictly because it's, he's a male and that way there's a male presence also. The boys are just, yeah. Yeah, if my tech person wasn't a male I would just go with the two of us. And before just I started it was just the two of us but I have him come strictly, yeah because then there's a male presence it just covers a little bit easier but I would say you definitely no matter what your size of group is have at least two adults at all times just for safety purposes. You can keep track of everything, yeah. Yeah. And we do limit pretty much everything we limit to 20 max because once you start getting over 20 kids it starts getting out of control. Unless you're- So overnight lock-in is due? Overnight lock-in is 15 unless we make an exception for like siblings or something like that. But yeah, 15, 16 I think we had 16 last year and that was, it was a lot. It doesn't seem like very many but for 12 hours it's a lot. Yeah, for a whole overnight or even just a few hours that's a lot of kids. I mean think about hosting a birthday party for your child, it's the same thing. It's a lot of hormones. Well I'll bet you, yeah. Unfortunately. So I can imagine too that as you were talking about some of these events like the ones with the popcorn and the lock-ins and let them play tag and run in the library and you said it hard for the kids sometimes to say, well this is so weird we're being loud and doing things. What about the staff who are usually more about don't do that, don't make a mess, but they have to say like for the three staff that work these it's like let go of the rules. Yeah, the three of us staff that work it we'll just say we kind of had to orientate them but my youth services person she's a mother of five so she's totally used to chaos. And like I said, I've been working with teenagers for a long time. So for me it's a big deal. I'm like, and even my custodian person I'll be like, hey Lisa we're having teenage she's like, all right I'll just play and it's gonna take me another extra half an hour. I'm like, yeah that's fine. We accept it pretty well. I don't have any of my mature staff don't work these so that might be a different issue but they're pretty understanding they know that I let the kids I want the kids to have fun and I want them to feel welcome and I want them to enjoy their time at the library that is just as much as anything. And then having these events you know these specific things will make them maybe come at other times just to borrow things or do other programs. Like our kids have to have volunteer hours to graduate from high school. So they're much more willing to seek us out to do their volunteer time too because they do feel a little bit of they feel more welcome. They feel like the play at the library is someplace they want to keep up with you know that kind of thing. Yeah, we have a question here that just came in. Let's see here. A lot of these activities seems to be mostly about providing some supplies and letting the kids decide what to do. Do you have any supplies that you think should be on hand for every event regardless of what else is planned? Like your default backups of if nothing else works maybe. My default backups, like I said having the video game set up having the rainbow loom or some sort of crafty kind of thing because of course the girls always enjoy crafts jewelry making or something. This is gonna sound really stupid but having cups and plates is like totally essential because of food but you also can do lots of activities with like red solo cups. You can do you know races and contests and all sorts of weird stuff even do some like you know cup stacking and that kind of thing. Oh yeah. Honestly like having plastic cups like the red solo cups or whatever cups you decide to use if you wanna use reusable ones. Yeah, cause you can use those for more than just the food. It sounds kind of silly but it's true. And once you have a lot of these things I mean you've got a lot of these things you've been doing for years and some places might take a while for them to build up with supplies and whatnot to have all these but once you've gathered everything over time for all these different activities then any of them can be your backup. You can say to the kids tonight we're doing a movie night but then if they decide they don't want to or the movie isn't what they thought or they wanted something else you've got well here's the 20 other things we've done over the last two weeks. Yeah, well the other thing that I have that we have that I really enjoy is having like beach balls and hood hoops cause you can do lots of games and stuff with that kind of stuff too. You can go outside and do stuff or even inside. So yeah, but you're absolutely right Krista. You know once you kind of get like this base of stuff built up you can use stuff in a lots of different ways. If your kids in story time enjoy it there's a good chance your teenagers will. Just adjust a little bit for their age a little bit but they like playing with hula hoops and beach balls and that kind of stuff too. Maybe not necessarily like the, you know the scarves and that kind of thing but they'll enjoy a lot of that kind of stuff too. So talk to your PE teachers at school and see if there's something that they have that they'll let you borrow or if they're getting rid of stuff that they'll let you have. That's how we got some of our beach balls and that kind of stuff cause the school is getting new ones. Awkward new stuff, yeah. Gave us the old ones so I don't know. It kind of depends on your kids and your community and what works for you. Yeah, I was thinking you're gonna have to like feel out what are your kids into and what do they keep? What is their default that they keep wanting to do every time or were they always asking about the most but still introduce them to new things too so you never know what they might want to get bored and you never know what new thing they might latch onto too. Yeah, exactly. It can be an ongoing thing, yeah. All right, so we are a bit after 11 o'clock so I think we will wrap up here. I'm going to pull over cause it presents your control to my screen so I'm gonna show you guys. Do, do, do, do, do this thing. All right, this is just the page for it. This is the link that is gonna be included with the archive and everyone who attended today and registered for today's show will get an email from me probably by the end of the day today when the recording is ready for you to watch. I've got to upload it to YouTube as I said and get it all processed. And then you have a link to this here. This is the link that Janine sent me of her actual slides. Her slideshow is here. So all the slides that she just showed you that choose your own adventure that she just started the beginning of. A link right there is in this folder as well so you'll have all of that that you can use. And then up here is the activities folders with different info and helpful things for some of the different programs that she did. So you'll have access to all of this. And then I did also go and you're showing it. This is yours, right? Yes. Her- Some of it's my personal stuff so you don't probably really care about the food I like. But- Do you have- Do you have- Do you have a Christmas folder, teen nights folder, a couple of other folders there that might be of interest? Yeah. So all of that will have links that will be included in the archive afterwards so you can have all of this available to you. So this is our main page for Encompass Live where we've got our upcoming shows but right underneath that is a link to our archives. And this is where today's show will be the most recent ones are at the top of the list. So today's will be right up there at the end of the day today. And when you go into it you'll then have like this one a link to the recording on our YouTube channel and then a link to this folder over here in Google where Jean has all of her stuff and I'll also add one to the Pinterest as well. So that'll all be here and you'll be sent this page where you can get to access to everything afterwards. And while we're here in the archives I'll show you, we do have a search feature here so you can search our entire show. This year, 2019 is the 11th year of Encompass Live. Crazy. So we do have where you can look at just the most recent 12 months worth search just the most recent 12 months worth or the entire full archives. So when you are searching here you can search by anything that's in the title and the description of a show people's names who the presenters were but pay attention when you are watching something. Everything has a date of when it was originally broadcast and so note that some things here some of the things we've had on the show might be old, outdated, the service or product might not exist anymore, links might be broken but they're always all gonna stay up there all of our recordings are there. We are librarians so we save and archive things for you for historical purposes so we'll always have these always up here but just pay attention to the dates when you are watching something older. Some of the things are always gonna be relevant and useful to you like book lists of things but certain things just pay attention to when you are taking a look at our archives. So like I said, today's show will be there. So thank you everyone for attending. Thank you so much Janine for sharing this with us. I'm so glad to see all these great and awesome things that you were doing. We just got some notes on the some people commented in the terrific show, thanks. Thank you guys for attending. If you have any questions or need anything please feel free to email me. My email's on all the information. Yep, I think you have that on the first. Yeah, there you go. Yep, right there, yep, that'll work. Of the slides there, yep. So this is great. Yeah, I'm good to learn all these fun things to do, the things that I might even wanna do myself at home. Yeah, it's for family programs. Yeah, so that will wrap up today's show. I hope you join us next week when we're going to have a show for academic libraries. ACRL outcome measurement made easy. Project Outcome is a program that's done out of American Library Association while measuring what's going on in your libraries. And they did a project outcome for public libraries. And now ACRL has created one specific to academic libraries. So if you want to measure and see what's going on in your library and how you can impact your having and whatnot in your academic library, this would be one for you. We did do a previous Encompass Live on Project Outcome for public libraries. So if you're interested in that, check out our archives. Look at our archives for that and you can watch that show. But this is the one that we will have next week. So hope you'll sign up and join us for that or any of our other upcoming shows. Encompass Live is also on Facebook. You can see I've got a link here. This is our Facebook page. So if you're big on Facebook, give us a like. We do post, here's a login reminder to log in for today's show if you want to when our recordings are available and posted up on here, we do announce them. So if you are big on using Facebook, please definitely give us a like over there and you'll keep up with what we are doing on the show. And that wraps up today's show. Thank you everyone for attending this morning. And we will see you another time on Encompass Live. Thanks, bye-bye. Thanks, Krista.