 Welcome back to Big Talk from Small Libraries 2020. I am Krista Porter, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Big Talk from Small Libraries is sponsored by the Association for Rural and Small Libraries and the Nebraska Library Commission. And we are at our 10 a.m. Central Time presentation with us on the line right now is Monica Tiedemann. Good morning, Monica. Good morning. She is a Nebraska presenter, Stromsburg Public Library in Stromsburg, Nebraska. Population served 1,170. Yeah. And she has a presentation here to talk about holiday programming that did their library. Some really fun and cool things I heard about that they were doing up there. So I'll just hand it over to you, Monica, to tell us all about it. Okay, that sounds great. Thanks, Krista. Okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about what we do during holiday break from school. And we're just gonna get right into it here. How did this whole idea start for us? I think in the description for this program, when I did the proposal for Krista, I think I put down that we started with the holiday break activities and those have went into early out activities and no school day activities. And actually, as I went back and looked at my calendars and some of our old flyers, we were actually doing a few things on early out days and no school days. And then that kind of went into how can we occupy the kids also during holiday break? And so that's how this whole idea got started. And it started because I was looking for ways to help parents with board kids, with kids who were maybe too old for daycare, but staying at home for long amounts of time wasn't a good idea for them either. And I just thought about how early outs and those no school days can really throw a wrench into your schedule if you're a parent, especially if the parents work out of town or they aren't able to have someone pick them up or things like that, the issues that come up. And for our town, we have a lot of parents that work out of town. Most parents do not work here in town. Most of them drive anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour away to go to work. And so that's kind of where my thinking came in on how to make this work and just how we as a library could help serve the people of our community. Our holiday break activities, we kind of do a rotation. So we do one thing, one day and one the next. And then that even leads into our early out days and our no school days. We kind of have a rotation of four or five things that we do. And that way nobody gets tired of what we're doing and it can kind of keep the interest up and people still wanna come. We do have a few rules with these days. We didn't wanna become the town babysitters for everyone. So we have a strict unattended children policy in our library that we had to implement a few years ago. And we just stick to the guidelines that are in that policy. So children that wanna come to the library for the activities typically have to be nine or older to come by themselves. And if they are younger than nine, they can come but they have to be accompanied by an adult or a caregiver who is at least 14. Most of our ideas don't work for smaller kids. The movie days do and some other things but like our craft ideas or some of the other activities that I'll talk about. They don't really work for kids younger than nine anyway. So it kind of helps keep that age limit in there that the parents know this is the activities for these kids in their ages. We do occasionally sometimes with some of our activities allow younger kids to be dropped off and the parents or a caregiver doesn't have to stay but not during the holiday breaks activities for sure. All right. So what we do, this is where we started out. We started out with these four days that were kind of in our rotation and these days have actually changed quite a bit since we started. They don't look exactly like this but I wanted to show you kind of what our thoughts were when we first began and how we've been able to grow them and change them a little bit. Okay, so for instance, Lego Day there started out with just Lego sets that me and my assistant brought from home and we both had boys and so it worked out great. We had plenty of Legos but that kind of got hard to keep track of whose Legos were whose, were we getting them all home, et cetera. So I'll tell you how we changed that one. And then Movie Day, we did movies that we purchased that we had the licensing rights for. So we weren't violating any licensing rights or things. We did aim to get the newest movies. We could. We tried a few things with movies to see what worked best and we tried random movies, just something that was a kid's movie that we thought people would like. We tried older movies, thought maybe some of the old movies they would like, like even old, I was gonna say Disney but some of those aren't licensed for but we tried some older movies and our best results, our best attendance just happened when we got the newest movie. We could, if you could get it before it came out on Netflix you had even better results. So that's what we aimed for. Mention while you're on the movies they're here in Nebraska at least we do have a movie licensing that we provide that we pay for it from the state that covers all the public libraries in the state. It's not every single movie out there it's with one particular company but we do help out with that with the library. So that's something to look at in your own states as well as there's something statewide that's being offered to help you out to be able to do that because that is very important to watch that licensing. Yes, and definitely read the requirements of the licensing because there are certain ways you can advertise and certain ways you cannot. I see some libraries get really creative with that but yeah, definitely read what you can say about which movie you're showing also. Okay, craft day was another day that we started. We just thought we don't want it to be, I don't know, we wanted something for everyone. And so craft days started out as very simple crafts that the kids could do themselves they didn't require a lot of instruction and we picked out two or three crafts that just from Pinterest, we rely heavily on Pinterest for our craft ideas our story time ideas, things like that. And so we would pick out two or three crafts from Pinterest and then we would print out the instructions for them or maybe just some pictures and we would put them in stations around the room and the kids could go around our meeting room and do as many crafts or as few crafts as they wanted to do if they wanted to do them all, that was great. And then our last day that we used at the beginning of all this was gaming day. Now our library did a youth literacy or youth improvement grant a few years ago before my time and they had purchased two Wii systems and some carts and games and things like that. We have like, I don't know, we have a lot to end. So we brought those up from the basement and let kids play on those. And then we would bring again board games that we had at home and set those up in the meeting room and let kids play on those. One thing we were surprised about with the board games is how many kids didn't know how to play just even basic like checkers or battleship. I brought battleship from home and nobody knew what to do with battleship. So we had to kind of ask some questions and work on finding which board games kids were even familiar with and what they wanted to play. And I'll talk about kind of where we landed on those. We also ran into the Wii systems being just old enough that some kids weren't familiar with how to play them and they got frustrated a little bit with them. And it was a lot of kids to keep track of too for just my assistant and I and we found ourselves having to play the board games with the kids to keep things going. So that wasn't really what we had planned but we have changed that and we've got a good system now and I'll talk about that. So these are just some pictures from our early days when we first got started, you know, shoots and ladders they didn't know how to play that either. But this little girl here is doing, I think those were pipe cleaners, snowflakes and those turned out really good and the kids actually liked those. And then the boys just loved throwing the Legos on the table and figuring things out. This was me playing battleship with somebody and we had Jenga, the Lego bricks and then these are just some of the crafts I think one year we did crafts that were all focused on Christmas trees and these were different ways that they could make Christmas trees. Okay, so this is kind of where it has evolved to now and what we are doing with each of these days. Lego day, we put out an advertisement, not just a flyer on our front desk that we were looking for Lego sets. If anybody had Legos they wanted to get rid of we would gladly take them. We actually got quite a few donations that way of nice sets. So that was really good. I also looked on like the buy-sell trade sites if there were some that were going really cheap I would grab those. And then last year I put in a request to our friends at the library and asked them if they could justify us some basic like the red kit, the blue kit, the green kit and then some of those foundation tiles for kids to build on. Cause we were noticing like a lot of what we were getting kind of came in sets where you could specifically build something and we wanted to let those kids imaginations go a little more. And so we supplemented with these other basic kits and sets and that worked out really nicely. Let's see. Movie day, we haven't changed a whole lot. We found a good group with those. The only thing that has changed is our local public broadcasting station, the NET is offering episodes of some of their popular shows before they come out on TV. So we've had like Arthur shows. We've had Daniel Tiger. We've had Odd Squad is the next one that's coming up. And we show those sometimes instead of Movie Day. And those are ones that we let younger kids come to and if the parents feel like they'll sit and watch something or the parents just sit in there and watch the show with the kids too. So that's fine. Let's see. We don't always get those shown before they air on TV but it doesn't seem to matter. Kids are okay. They still wanna come and watch them, which is great. And that's just a way to supplement instead of doing maybe a two hour movie all the time. Sometimes it's just a one hour little show and that works out good for parents and kids too. Our craft day, we have changed it to where we just do a single craft that everyone does together. It requires a lot less prep work that way. And it also helps us to be able to like show the kids new things. We've done things like origami. We've done finger knitting one time. One time we turned them loose with puffy paint and all of our old CDs that we have. I mean, are you guys like us? We have a ton of old CDs that we used to need for our computers or we needed them for software. Things like that and we kept them in a case. So we've just put some puffy paint out and some Sharpies and things and told them to decorate the CDs. They loved it. We probably had five or six girls in there who like normally we cut off our days at about an hour because that's about how long their attention span lasts. But that day I think they were in there for two hours because they were having so much fun. And we went ahead and we strung up the CDs with some fishing line and hung them from the ceiling and they were up through the rest of December and the kids loved it. So that was a good one. Yeah, and that's that's great use. You never know what you have lying around that could be to be used CDs. They're that nice, iridescent rainbowy looking thing. I'm sure, you know, cats ever touches everyone's eyes. Yeah, they look cool. We had to use those all the time. And maybe some places have gotten rid of them but everyone's got a storage room with who knows what in the back, back corner. Yeah, that, you know, can come in handy. I mean, you look up on Pinterest, you know, crafts with CDs and there are tons of ideas. Some are a little more complex and we just kept it easy what the kids could do on their own. So, okay, on gaming day. Oh, I'll show you some pictures and talk about them about a couple other crafts but on gaming day because a number of the kids couldn't run the wheeze, we just went to just board games for a while and tried to figure out what board games the kids knew how to play. But again, that still required my assistant and I to be in the room with them, it felt like. So it was okay, it was fun. It was a great way to interact with the kids but it wasn't always practical for us to do that. And so what we have kind of landed on currently and this totally depends on your kids. We have been doing these activities for like six years now. And so we've kind of had a couple of rounds of kids come through because they only come to library activities for two or three years and then they think they get too old or something like that. And we have a good group right now that they all get along, they like to come to the library, they like to come to our activity days. And what we have found that they really love is on the wheeze systems, they love Mario Kart and they know how to play it. So that works out well. And then they love that cow racing game that's on wheeze. If you haven't seen it, it's hilarious, go play it. And so what we do now is we have purchased two new TVs that look a little better. The TVs we were using previously, I wish I would have had a picture of. One was probably from, oh, I'm sorry, Christa. No, I was just laughing, yeah. Yeah, I mean one was, I shouldn't have taken a picture because I think it's still in the basement. One was probably from the 70s. It was like a 15-inch TV with the brown paneling on the outside and it was on a cart. And then the other one was maybe from the 90s, we might have advanced that much. Not on the screens. Yeah, so we did go buy two new TVs, things they're easier to move them around as much as we do, because those old ones were heavy. And so with lighter TVs, our carts move around easier. We can change up where we're having it. We do still do board games, simple ones. And we also bring, we found that the kids really liked dice games, like Tenzi is really popular or Farkel. A lot of the kids knew how to play Farkel. Another thing that they like is the Spotted Game. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's the round circle cards and you have to identify different things that are on there. There's all sorts of Spotted Games. You can find them at Target, Walmart. We've taught kids how to play checkers and they really want to play the checkers now. So we do still get checkers out for that. And because we have two, and we've added computer games too. So what we do now is we set up the two Wii systems with the two TVs out in the main room. And we have five public computers that the kids can use. And then we set up the board games in the meeting room. And we put out a signup sheet that the kids can sign up for a time slot on the computers and a time slot on the Wii. And they get 15 minute time slots. And we set the timer on the computer, like the main desk computer for 15 minutes. And then when that goes off, we tell everybody they have to rotate. And that way everybody gets their time on the computer. They get their time on the Wii. And then they also have some time to just play some board games, card games, things like that. And we found that that just works really well. And the kids are okay with it. They're fine with that. And also with the computer games, we do limit them to like, I should have written them down, but there's like three websites that we say, these are the ones you can play during this time. I mean, other times when they're here and they're playing computer games, we don't care what they play, but there were some concerns with some of the games they were wanting to play. And so to make it easier where we felt like it was a library sanctioned activity, we said you can play on these websites, on the computers. So that's how we took care of that. I think this is just some more pictures. This is our Wii set up. This is the Cal Racing game. It's kind of neat to see also that we have older kids who will help the younger kids and they don't mind. They don't mind showing them how to play the games and things. This is Wild Crats when we did their show. And then these were the stocking caps we did this year for our craft. They turned out so cute. Lookup stocking cap ornaments. And they were really easy to make. We had all ages doing them and they really liked those. And this is just some more pictures of things we've done. Our Legos, because we have more Legos now, we kind of have them sorted out in boxes. And we just put a few boxes on each table and kids can walk around and get the different Legos that they want out of those. And that works out well. This was another craft. I'm gonna talk about some different days and different craft ideas and things that we've done. But this one was one that we just threw in instead of kind of as one of our craft days. I think it was an early out in December before holidays actually started. And we told them we had those rolls of craft paper and we rolled them out and let them cut however big a segment they wanted and they were making their own gift wrap paper for the holidays. And those turned out kind of cute. That was a lot of fun. Okay, so how many of these events we do over a holiday break kind of depends on when the holidays land, on what days of the week, what time we have off for the library and what time that just for the days and all those work out. And so I looked up some stats here and in 2014 we did eight different events. In 2015 we did six, but in 2016 we only did three days just because of how the scheduling worked out. So you can do these every day of holiday break if you want to, you can just do them on a specific day during holiday break, whatever works out for you guys. And with that, with doing more events, like it got kind of tiresome to just do the same four things over and over. So we've thrown in some different ideas in here too. And I wanna check my time because I get really talkative here. Nope, you're fine, you're good. You're only about 20 minutes in, yeah. Right, so I need to talk slower. I was just gonna say you're talking about the scheduling. I think you're also probably at the mercy of when is the school breaks too of what days are available for that and if there's other things also happening on some of those days in the community. Yeah. And it gotta work out. Because sometimes our school will have a full two weeks of break and sometimes they don't. So that's the difference. Previously, my assistant wasn't able to come work on Thursdays all the time and Thursday is like a short day for us. We're only open from 10 to noon. And so a lot of times we didn't do anything on Thursday then because sometimes being one man with some of these activities wouldn't work as well. Yeah. Maybe movie day, I can handle that. But so all of those things kind of came into play of how we worked it out that week or that break. So this last year, I think we did eight activities again. And that's a lot. I mean, you're ready to send the kids back to school. The teachers are all like, oh, the kids are coming back. And I'm like, yay. It keeps us busy during the holidays. That's for sure. So these are some of the activities that we have added in just because we thought they'd be fun or something different than our same four days all the time. So the first one, the kids New Year's Eve party. Let's see, that started in 2017. And for that one, we did these firework paintings which were really cool. They turned out a lot better than I thought. And we made our own party hats and we did Chinese lanterns too. We were just trying to think of things that you associate with New Year's. I think we had snacks that day too. And we did like a little countdown for that. But it was in the mid-afternoon and that was okay. But this year, we kind of copied what another town close to us does. And they do a New Year's Eve party. And they do a countdown in a balloon drop. They're a bigger library. They do a countdown in a balloon drop at noon on New Year's Eve for the kids. So we copied that a little bit. We did not do a balloon drop. And we were expecting like seven to eight kids. We average anywhere from eight to 12 kids usually on these activities on a day. I think we had 14 at game day this week that we did. So we were expecting that. But the crafts that we chose would have been great for seven or eight kids. But we had 25 kids and parents show up for that party. Wow. Surprise. Yeah. Yeah, it was like, oh no. I mean, all of our crafts had some form of stapling that had to be done. And so Emily and I were literally standing at the front of the room just stapling for like an hour and a half. That was all we did. So we're like, okay, next year we're gonna rethink this a little bit. But I mean, that's encouraging that people want it and they come to it. So that was good. In 2016, we did a polar express party where we just had hot cocoa and we watched the movie. And then this one here, in 2018, I had my new assistant Emily and her brother is actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest hand-drawn maze. And so we had her brother. I know, isn't that cool? I can't even imagine doing that. That's amazing. That's insane. It's crazy. When they, when he completed it they actually put it up in the gym at York College. And it was like laid over saw horses. And it took up like the whole gym, I think. It was crazy. So Eric came in and he talked a little bit about how he started drawing mazes and what interested him about it and why he did it. And then he showed the kids kind of some basics that you have to know about mazes, like how to draw them so that they connect that you've got to have better sometimes. And then you have to make sure your mazes actually solvable for people. So the kids got to draw their own mazes, kind of take hints and tips from Eric. And he walked around and showed them things. I've included his Instagram page there, the at-idraw mazes. He posts a lot of his mazes up there. And his mazes have been on t-shirts. They've been on the Renza, the papers that go on the trays. That's been his mazes. Okay, cool. Yeah. So it was kind of cool because then he could show the kids and there were some things they recognized, and they're like, wow, this is, I think we had more parents show up to that activity than we usually do because they wanted to see all this too. Okay. Sometimes I think it was that same year that for our craft, again, we were using things that we had in the library. And so we did book page crafts. And it's a great use of books that you're just gonna weed. It's a great use of books you might have just laying around donated things or things like that that you don't have in your collection. And we made Christmas trees. We made origami stars. And I mean, there's tons of activities out there of what you can do, but they really liked that. And it was a good way to show them that you can go home and do these same things too. This is, make sure you have your parents' permission for books and things, but they could do that. And this was an example of, this little girl was under the age of nine, but her big sister who was 15 brought her to the library and they did the craft together and had a lot of fun. So that was good. Okay. And this year we added a couple of new things that we were excited about. And I think the kids were too. But we added a breakout EDU kit to our collection in this year and we made an escape room for the kids for one day over break. If you're not familiar with the kits, they come in a box and it comes with everything you need to make an escape room. Our purchase of the kit gave us a subscription to the breakout EDU. It's just like it's spelled there, EDU website. And they have tons and tons of ideas of escape rooms you can do. A lot of them are geared towards schools like their science themes, there's math themes, different things that the teachers would want them to focus on, but you can also put in holiday themes like we put in a Christmas search and found different escape rooms that dealt with just a Christmas theme. We're gonna do one in March and we're gonna, we were gonna focus on St. Patrick's Day, but then we found a better one that we liked that's on actually breaking out of Mr. Limoncello's library. So we thought, oh, we gotta do that. But these kits do come with like the locks. They come with instructions. They come with, I mean, just anything you can think of. And you just follow the instructions for off the breakout EDU website. They tell you exactly how to set the locks. They tell you there's printables that you have to print off sometimes there. We have to usually provide like an iPad or a computer for people to use at some point during the escape room. And we just have a timer going on the TV in the meeting room. So they know how much time they have left. We don't do any extra decorating or anything that goes with the theme. We just focus on the kit. And what we did was most of the escape rooms are set for 45 minutes time limit. And so we just put out a signup sheet and we had four different time periods. And we took the kids if they needed to have a team of four to six people when they signed up so that we didn't have too much randomness there. And so the kids just came in with their teams and they tried to break out. We discovered that maybe we picked too hard of an escape room because nobody broke out. Somebody did come like within 30. Yeah, we were like, okay, we need to go easier the next time because it's not fun if nobody ever breaks out. We actually had so much interest from posting about this and advertising that we were doing it for the kids that we ended up doing an adult one in February using the breakout EDU kit because so many adults wanted to do it. So that was fun. Okay, another new thing for us this year was virtual field trips. It was something that I had wanted to try for a while and I really hadn't. And then Krista, I think you did a encompass live on virtual field trips maybe. We did, yes. With the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, their moral hall, dinosaurs, they did various things, but yes, they do that a lot and lots of groups do, but yeah. Yeah, and I think there was like some websites. I got them from a webinar somewhere that there were websites shared that like you could go to and find out more information about more virtual field trips. I think one of our ESUs or agitational service unit people was involved in one of our presentations on that, too, talking about other places to get these kind of events. Yeah, yeah. So where I went for this one was that website there, the CISLC.org, and they have all sorts of field trips you can do. I mean, there's unlimited amount and some of them are free, some of them are not. I mean, there was like some $300 and $500 ones listed on there, so pay attention to which ones you're registering for. The field trips do typically require some type of software like what we're using today with GoToMeeting, some of them have Zoom and some of them use Skype, and we have accounts with all of those, so that worked out fine for us. The one that we did actually use Zoom and that was new to my assistant, but I've used it and so we were able to get that going pretty easily. And we did the one that gives you a tour of Rocky Mountain National Park. My assistant was in charge and she said that the ranger was great. It was everything that she hoped they would do. They did a flyover video of the park so the kids could see kind of what they were talking about. The ranger also talked about the park emblem. You can kind of see it down here. You talked about what all the different parts of the emblem stand for and why it's on there and how that connects to national parks. She talked about just the national parks so that kids were aware of, maybe some kids have never gone on a vacation to a national park and didn't know what that was. And so she talked about that and then they showed videos of the different animals that live in the park and what you might see if you come to the park and things like that. And then of course, one of the things she talked about was if you have any fourth graders, fourth graders, and I should look this up, but I think it's fourth graders and their families. Yes, the free and yeah. Yeah, you can get free passes to state parks like if you have a fourth grader in your car or something like that. So she was asking, are any of you fourth graders and be aware of this? So we only had to show up here beginning September 1st, all kids in the fourth grade have access to a special park pass. Okay. Every kid in a park is what it's called. Okay, yeah. So that was, I just, I grew up taking family vacations but I know not everyone can do that and maybe a kid would never go to a national park and we thought this was a fun way to show them the possibilities or just to let them see some of those things they may never see. So there's a lot. And also I'll clarify, as I said to every kid, this actually is for them and their entire family. It gets free access because the one child is in the fourth grade. Okay, that's what I thought is like the whole family. So yeah, that's a really neat deal. We only had six kids show up for this one and she kind of was trying to get interaction with the kids and they were pretty shy but they finally warmed up to ask some questions and things and it was a need to experience and we definitely need to look into another one but there's anything you can think of, there's a virtual filter for it, so. Okay, and then one other thing that we've done that is really popular is bingo. We kind of have a joke in our area about no money for bingo, but you can't charge people for buying their bingo cards. That's called gambling. Libraries. Yeah, libraries can't do gambling. So we can't do that but the kids really liked it and I think they'd used bingo enough in the school rooms that they were familiar with what was happening and they liked it. As you can see, I think the girls there had like three cards each, they wanted to do more than one card and we used prizes, leftover prizes from summer reading and we kind of have a junk prizes, they're like little cheap things that have been given to us over the years and they loved it. They wanted to get prizes for blackouts and first one to get a bingo and we just kept going until people were tired of bingo. So that was a neat experience and we actually should do that again because we haven't done it in a while. All right, we do have some questions before you go on to the next slide. I forgot to grab them while you're on that one, go back to that. So I want to know about the breakout EDU room. When you had the kids one, is there an adult or a staff member inside the escape room with the children? No, we did not. Our meeting room is right by our circulation desk and so what we did was we let the kids be in there on their own and then if they needed hints or things, they are given two hint cards that they could come out and ask for hints. So it wasn't actually locked in really? No, no, we don't know. I should have clarified that, yeah, no. We don't lock anybody in or anything like that. We just shut the door. Yeah, okay, cool. And then for the virtual field trips, I think you did mention someone wanted a range of costs on the virtual field trips. You did just mention that that there is some are pricier than others. Right, yeah, they go up to like $300, $500, but then a lot of them are just free. Some of them are $20, $25. There's hundreds of field trips on that website and yeah, whatever your budget might be, you can find something. This one with the Rocky Mountain National Parks was free. A lot of them are free. I think the ones through the university here, the virtual tours that are not too expensive. The University of Nebraska State Museum does them and I remember they were not, it depended on the size of your group sometimes, I think. Yeah, and like I have a flyer here in front of me from Henry Dorley Zoo, yeah, and they do virtual field trips. And I think on there, the program fee is $125, it says. Not bad, all right. Yeah, I mean, there's a range of everything, but we really like the national park. Yeah. And the brand for the Breakout Kits, that's Breakout EDU is the brand. Yeah, that is the brand. And they have a website you can go to. And we actually got ours, our system in Nebraska, our libraries are divided up into three systems now. Is that right? Four, there's four of them now. Four, four. There's still four, five to four. And our system, we did a group purchase of those Breakout EDU kits. And then we got a little bit of a deal because we did a group purchase. And then also our system director purchase. So if you're in the Southeast library system of Nebraska, Scott actually has, I think two of these kits at the office that you can check out and borrow. Yeah, so you can test it out here in Nebraska, yeah. So Breakout EDU is the name of it, yeah. And for virtual, I finally found the page for the virtual field trips on the new, this is just one example here in Nebraska, University of Nebraska State Museum. There's range from $35 to 125, depending on how long, which session it is and whether you're a member of something and how long, how many minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. So, yeah, look around, look in your state, see if one of your state museums or universities are doing these kind of educational type programs. Yeah, because they're just, it's a way to get a professional or somebody to come into your library and teach the kids about something they wouldn't normally maybe go see. And without paying for the mileage and paying the program fee and things like that, it's a nice way to do it. All right, yeah. So I think just wrapping up here, ways that we advertise, how we get the word out about all of this. We use flyers, we make all of our flyers on Canva. There are six places around town that I can put flyers in. And so, you know, like post office and the coffee shop and the grocery store and the hardware store. So we put those flyers up and those flyers advertise the whole schedule for holiday break and what we're doing each day. So parents and kids can make plans that way. The school lets us post our events in the weekly elementary newsletter. We just shoot out the information to the school secretary and she puts it in the newsletter. And then sometimes like it would, usually we just send her a PDF of our flyer. And then sometimes she'll also make copies of that and put it around the school. So it's nice cooperation that way. Our school is a consolidated school. And so it is actually located three miles out of town. So it's hard to do some things, but this cooperation is a way that we can communicate by email. And I don't have to take flyers out there. They graciously just make copies and hang them around the elementary wing for the elementary kids. Facebook events are a popular way for us to communicate. People really, you know, there's a certain age range of parents that they rely fully on Facebook to know what's coming up at the library. And so we do all those event covers and things through Canva also. And then, oh, and with the holiday break where we have like anywhere from six to eight activities, we do a separate Facebook event for each of those days so that parents can click going. And then they get that reminder when that event is coming up and it just helps them make sure they don't forget. It's sometimes that happens too. And then we also post on the marquee that is located uptown. It's a lighted marquee that's in the square. And the newspaper, I can do a weekly newsletter, little blurb in the newspaper. And so I always include upcoming activities in that also. And if you wanna see our activities and things we have coming up, we have had other libraries reach out to us on Facebook and ask about activities that they see we're doing. Emily's brother, Eric, has went to a couple of different libraries now and did the maize program for them. And so if you have any questions, you can message us on Facebook. There's our website. We are active on Instagram also. Parents love to see pictures of their kids having fun at the library. And so we kind of have a standard notice that says we take pictures at activities. If you do not want your children posted on social media, let us know so that we can make sure we keep them out of the pictures or don't post pictures that have the kids. And that is everything. If you need to email me directly, there's my email and my phone number here at the library. And any other things, any questions? Yeah, we do have a couple of questions and counts came in. If anybody has any questions, any other questions you want to ask of Monica, go ahead and type it into your questions section of your go-to-webinar interface. I'm monitoring that here and I can read them off to her. Just to go into comments earlier, saying wonderful low-cost ideas for some of the things you have there. Of course, you would use what you got, use what you can, get a hold of. Yeah, we definitely try to just use what we have and not spend extra on this. And that's the question about when the kids come in. Do parents or guardians check kids in and out or are they allowed to come and go on their own? They're allowed to come and go on their own. We're a small enough town that you kind of know which kids are who and you know, crack up. Emily has kids that are actually in the age range of the kids that are coming right now. And so that works out really nice because she knows the kids, she has a familiarity with them and their parents. We've even, you know, she's even used the thing of, you know, I can text your mom and tell her what you're doing right now. So maybe knock it off. And they don't usually do anything right there. Absolutely. Someone does wanna know, I think you mentioned you had these, but you didn't mention, what are the three computer websites that you allow the children to access for game days? A, B, mouse, I know is one. And then pbskids.org. And I cannot think of the third one, I know. I can't think of the third one. The PBS Kids one, yeah. Yep. And kids are usually familiar with those. The ABC mouse, they do that at school a lot. And I think there's like a math one that we let them go on to. And they use that at school a lot also. And so they're just, they're familiar with them. We're not having to teach anybody. With some of the other websites, kids were wanting to play with their friends we're playing, but maybe they didn't know how to play it. And then they were bugging the kids next to them or wanting us to show them how to play it when we had no idea. Right. And this just kind of cut down on the confusion and things that were going on around the computers. We just said, here's the three websites you can go on. And that seems to work okay. So many different, yeah. So the one is the ABC. I think it's ABC mouse. Macy mouse. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Give an email to Monica if you wanna know who the ones that she can't remember. Yes, yes, again that's one of those things that my assistant takes care of. And so I'm like, I can't remember those. And we do have some suggestions from other people which is good too. Someone says the elementary schoolers at our library love National Geographic kids. Okay. Good one to do. And someone wants to know if it's the math. You said there's a math one. Is it CoolMathForKids.com? Yes, that's what it is. A math one, yep. All right. And someone just suggests using the one, getting a Moncala board for your library for the game day. That that may be something to the kids. I have brought my Moncala and I was surprised the kids didn't know how to do it. Now it's easy enough to teach. That's something quick and easy to teach for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I should do that again. And let's see, let me hear another question. What do you do if you have special needs children and they become disruptive but no parents are there? Do you have that situation, I guess? We haven't had that situation. Well, we have had that situation in the library with special needs kids before and we've just made it very clear to the parents that they need to stay with them if they're coming. We do, we haven't had this with the holiday break or the early out because they don't come but with summer reading, we've had the issue that again, small town, I know that there are kids that have parents with them all day at school and then the parents send them here to an unsupervised with no help or anything. And those do cause- And they might not realize they don't have the same one-on-one assistance with them at the library as they did at school. Yeah. And typically we've been okay. If not, we have just called the parent or the grandparent and said, this isn't working today. You're gonna have to come sit with them or take them home. It's the same kind of thing, especially in the small towns like we have here, you know people, so it's easy to talk to them. I don't think yet. One of the kids ran away one day because he wasn't happy with something we were doing and luckily he only ran away to like the backyard of the library, but we had to talk to, you know, that caregiver and be like, maybe he just can't be here by himself when there's three of us to 25 kids. Right, right. All right. And now we have, now really, since we were talking about this, especially as Jim was related to or separate even from all this in your presentation today is about your holiday programming, but do you have any special needs programs that you do at the library? We don't, that's a good idea though. I mean, and if parents would ask us about it, we would for sure create something for them. Right now I don't have any that come to the library regularly, but that's something to look at though. You do know that they are in town. There are children in that situation that you could, yeah, they would make accommodations for and everything. Yeah, it's always a good idea to know your community. Right, and that would be something that I would definitely work with a teacher from the school with. I was a parent at the school for a while and so you just, you need guidelines and you need outside help sometimes with those. That's a great place to start because you know they've got a special attention there definitely at the end of the school. Yep, yep. All right, either last minute desperate question you wanna ask of Monica right now, you can type it in, otherwise there's, you've got her email and phone number, give her a call. Just some last comments, people saying thank you for sharing very good ideas and someone loves the virtual field trip ideas, they're gonna steal it, steal that idea. Yes, steal away. We do so, yeah. All right. All right, well thank you so much, Monica. I'm so glad you were able to come on Big Talk today and share about all these great programs you're doing for the holidays. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. Hope you have a good, good next holiday break. Yeah, yeah. All right, all right. I'm gonna pull back, present your control on my screen right now. Do you? All right, so that was our 10 a.m. session. We're about 10, 50 a.m. central time right now.