 This week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter from the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we do 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're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's okay. We do record the show every week and then it is available in our archives later for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. We, both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So you are welcome to share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for all types of libraries in the state of Nebraska. So you will find things on our show across the board. Things for public schools, academics, anything and everything. So there's something out there for everyone. Before we do get started today, we have the Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do presentations, we have guest speakers that come in. Before we do start this morning, I do want to address obviously the situation happening in across the world right now regarding the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. We here at the Nebraska Library Commission have collected some resources for libraries to help them deal with it in their local or municipalities, local areas. And there's some information I'm going to show you here on our website about that. Some of you may have who watch the show regularly may see behind me, it looks a little different. This is because I am home. I am now as of Monday, two days ago working from home almost exclusively. Many of our Nebraska Library Commission staff are working on scheduling for that as well. We all do have access to our computers and email and phones and things like that. So the commission will still be available to you. Some staff may not physically be on site and we're working on schedules for that as we speak. But as far as helping libraries with things we do have here, this is the post we have now it is pinned to the top of our front page with resources for libraries. And this will be updated as we learn new things as new information comes out. So we do have a specific page for library specific resources on our website where we have links that our team will be updating here. All sorts of things to help you in your libraries and how you may be doing these two things there. General advice of course for patrons here as well. We are also attempting to track in Nebraska what libraries are closed or having limited hours or whatever it is that they're doing. We've set up a Google form that you can complete and this is specific for Nebraska libraries. I know other areas of the states are doing their own thing as well. But if you are in Nebraska, please do let us know so we can keep track. And then we are putting all this information onto a spreadsheet that then feeds out onto our site sort of listing the libraries and what their situation is, what the details are closed completely, specifically what is available, curbside pickup, wifi availability, all of that here. So that is something that we are trying to get the word out for libraries to help with that. There is a link right here just to jump to that right away. Also one big thing here in Nebraska for those of you who are involved with our basic skills classes that we have announced, Holly Duggan, we did chain our CE coordinator, did some changes to our basic skills courses schedule. So take a look at this. If you are involved in taking our basic skills classes, things are being postponed and bumped a little bit forward and then we're adding an additional week for all classes. Normally most of our classes take our two week long. They will be three weeks available for you to get through all of your work. Still save a lot of CE credits they're earning, they'll be earning, we'll have more time to complete all of your coursework there. So keep an eye on our page for things related to libraries, keep an eye on things from the information from the CDC, from the World Health Organization, from Nebraska's Health and Human Services, the governor's office that we have all the most up-to-date information from there. So, all right. So, all right, sorry, just checking my settings here. Make sure everything's going strong, okay. All right, so I just wanna make sure everyone's aware of that, that what is going on. I'll remind people of this when we do the show. We are lucky here at the Nebraska Library Commission on Encompass Live that we are an online show. So the show can go on in I Am At Home. Today our speaker this morning has to be at her library, but if any of our other presenters as the weeks go on can join us from wherever they are, whether they need to be in their library, able to get in there if they're doing it from home, from somewhere else. So as long as we have our presenters are still available on our Wednesdays, we will still have a show here for you, sharing information, putting out what's going on in libraries, updating you on what's happening in Nebraska libraries. And you can still take an hour and spend some time with us, talking about something not virus related. So, I'm going to, can our presenter control now to our speaker for this morning? Molly, I'm gonna make you a presenter. Today we have Molly Garrett who is, let's get your screens up. There you go, you should see the pop up to share your screen. There we go. She is next door from us, Cedar Rapids Public Library in Iowa. And she's gonna talk to us about teen summer camps that they are, they do there. But first I didn't think she wanted to mention a few things going on in Iowa. Yeah. State library, what's going on there? Yes, good morning everybody. I'm so happy to be here with you. Here in Iowa, it is a very rainy, dreary day. So this is going to be a little bit of cheer for me. In this library. Is that, what now? It is here, I'm looking out my window. Oh yeah. I'll breath it out, yeah. Yep. Our library is one of the biggest libraries in the state. And currently the governor here has kind of shut everything down. I think that's probably similar for most states. We are still working full staff as of today, but we are closed to the public. So that's where we're operating with. We are doing curbside pickup, as well as some virtual programming, which is kind of my key role right now is making sure that we have content to put out on our Facebook page and things like that. We're focusing pretty heavily on children's things. We do mother goose on the loose in story times. We do those live so that we don't have to worry about any copyright infringement, which I know has been a big discussion in a lot of libraries lately. Yes. So that's kind of what we're looking at here. I would guess in the next few days that we'll reduce staff and start doing a lot more work from home. I know that our other two largest library systems, Iowa City Public Library and Des Moines are both doing similar things. And a lot of those smaller libraries are following suit now with the, at least curbside pickup and, or just being closed in general, especially Iowa. I don't know if it's similar in Nebraska, but we have many, many, many small libraries. Oh, yes. Most of our libraries are small, independent, one building town, yeah. Yep, that's exactly the same here. So I have noticed that my library friends that are working in those smaller communities have started just closing and being closed. School systems here, we're still looking at that returning four weeks. It's our spring break week this week, so three weeks after that. But I don't know what will happen with that if it will continue to be like that. Yeah, it is varying across Nebraska as well. Some still just for a few weeks, just yet last night. Here, I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Capitol. They originally were just, they did have spring break this last week and they were closed for this week and then they announced last night, closed for the foreseeable future is actually wording. So they're just taking it, I think every two weeks they'll check in and decide where things are. And then every other ones across the state doing whatever is appropriate in their communities, yeah. It's gonna be a difficult time because those are definitely our partners, our peers in this adventure. I do a lot of outreach to the schools and things like that. So definitely changes the game with that. And then we have group homes also that I do outreach to and it will be a scary time for them because they're stuck all together forever for the next four weeks. So hopefully we can find some creative solutions to still support our more vulnerable members of the community and at the same time, keep our chins up and start thinking towards the future, you know, summer's coming. We're all, we're also thinking of that still, maybe. Well, I think, you know, it is a situation that changes almost hourly sometimes. So we have to deal with what's going on right now, I think, but also think of in a month, things could be completely different and different in a good direction. And we just don't know. So, and that is one reason we're continuing on with our show here, that this information, especially you talk about teen summer is coming up, summer reading, summer camps. In a few months, this may be something that libraries would love to use and emulate what you did in your library. Yeah. So you wanna go ahead and talk about that now? I think I'll share first before we do get into your actual presentation. Nope, I think that's everything. I just wanna applaud everybody though for all of the work that you're doing at your libraries during this time and, you know, still continuing to stay informed and joining us here today. That's a really amazing thing. I was very excited to ask, glad people were logging in. I was a little worried that we might just be talking to each other and then putting out the recording which is perfectly fine. I know people, not as I said, I think I said, not everybody can make it your Wednesday mornings and I have no problem with that. That's why I love, I push out the recording every week and I know we get three, four times as many people watch recordings and I would be perfectly fine if that happened but we do have people this to get today and I'm so happy that all of you were able to join us. Yeah. Okay, well, let's get started. I am going to talk to you today about teen summer camps. Hopefully, maybe some of you were able to join us at the Bridging Borders Conference in Omaha. That's why I was gonna mention, yes, this was a session for those of you. Last year, in the fall, in October, Iowa and Nebraska did a joint annual conference, Iowa Library Association and Nebraska Library Equation session and I know yours presentation was there. Yours was one that I was unable to get to, unfortunately, I didn't get it. But that's why I like that I have the show. If I miss something in person, I can always bring it on here and see it this way. Yeah. And so this one is going to be very similar if you were, I mean, nothing has changed because it was after the summer last, when the conference happened. So this presentation is going to be very similar to that. And so we're gonna go ahead and get started. So I wanna give you a little bit of history about our camps and why we did them, why we decided to do camps instead of traditional one-hour programming. You know, that's how I've always done programming in the past was I would have a one-hour special program for the teens. Maybe it was a craft, maybe it was an experiment, maybe it was a hangout session. And we just weren't seeing any teen attendance when we did these things. We have people in-house, but they just weren't interested. We might have our regular stop-by, but really it was maybe three or four people. And that's a lot of work to put in, as you know, to have not very many attendees or people that you're literally cajoling into coming into your program. And that's what was happening is that we were kind of like, hey guys, come on, come hang out with us. And they'd be like, eh, okay. So we decided that, you know, this maybe is not the best approach for us. Maybe we need to look at something different, something that will be more impactful. And so that's when we decided we were going to try doing camps. And we started with two camps, one at each of our libraries. We have two library branches, our downtown branch and our lab location, which is a little bit smaller. And so we decided to give this a try. And we did start with week-long camps. The camps that we started with were not full. We have a registration size, which we'll get into a little bit more in a minute, but we have a registration size of 15. And our first camp that we did, I think had nine signed up. And then our second one that we did was full. So it was a start, a try. So we did end up thinking that this was a better fit for our library. And so we decided to continue and do four week-long camps this time. And so we had two at each library. And we decided that we'd do all of those in the afternoon because after our initial trial of doing the morning one, we realized that was silly. So teens in morning and teens in Mali's don't, they don't happen in the morning time. So we did all afternoon camps. We also did, I just talked briefly about my group homes. We also did offer condensed camps for reaching four facilities that I travel to frequently that are group home members. So this is what our format looks like. Our camps are open to 12 to 18 year olds, which is a pretty large spread still. But we have, and again, we'll talk about some more of this in a little bit, but we've never seen really an issue with the age. We have had 12 year olds and we have had 18 year olds. And last year we had many who tried to sign up who were too young. So we'll talk about that a little bit more here in a minute. We do have a 15 person limit. And then we have its registration and then we have a wait list for the camps after that. These past last year, our registration has been full. And then also we've had a full wait list. So they are picking up steam. Unfortunately, we can't really expand any more than we already are. And you'll see why here in just a minute. So we run our camps from 1230 to 430 Monday through Friday. So this really is a true camp experience for hours with these kids every day. And it's really, really immersive for them. And it's a great experience for our library staff as well. Like I said, we present both of the camps at both locations. And I have traditionally presented all of the camps that we present with assistance from maybe a seasonal member of our team who comes in and they are just assigned to help me with crowd control essentially. The off-site camps, the residential ones that we do, these are a little bit more condensed and will maybe be a format that might work a little bit better for some of you who are in smaller libraries. But we have two, two hour sessions that we go out maybe like a Monday, Wednesday, and see them or we might do one in the morning. And one in the afternoon, something like that. So really what works best for those group homes that we go to. My slides are a little bit delayed when I click the button, so I apologize about that. So what really is going into these camps? What does this, what does this all look like? What I start with is I start with a theme. And that can be anything. It can be agriculture. It could be, I wanna do a camp about unicorns. I mean, really it could be anything. And then I fill in an outline with activities that will fit within that theme. So I also make sure that when I am creating these things, when I am doing this detailed outline with these activities that we are talking about things that are more those soft skills, things that are important to these teens that aren't just, oh, I'm making something, it's cool. But also, are you working with a group? Are you problem solving? Are you learning on your own? Those things that are really the true importance of what's happening for them. So we do do a lot of group work. We also have a lot of independent work and that's kind of how the camps are structured. And depending on which camp that you go to, you'll see that some have more or some have less of this working as teams or on your own. We do make sure, especially since it's such a long time that we have breaks and snacks throughout. And so that's really important for our teenagers, obviously, because if you're working super in depth on a project for a really long amount of time, sometimes you just need to break or sometimes you need to break from your peers. And so we make sure that those things are included in our schedule. This is the template that I use to create the camps. And as I'm going through these pictures and these slides, all of the pictures included in these are of either kiddos or of things that the kiddos have made. And they all signed photo release waivers. So I can also send you that form as well. But this is the template. So you can see on the left hand side is kind of what I start with. It's the bare bones. There's an introduction and expectations for the week. We start with something that's kind of an introductory kind of activity to get people on the right page. This particular one on the right hand side is for storytelling. And so we started out with Telepictionary, which is also called Telestrations. Some of you might know that. Just trying to get people involved and ready to kind of work on those activities. We also use story cubes and things like that. And then we have larger activities. And so you can see on the right hand side a breakdown of what that might look like. And then there's a break, another activity or two, and then another break. With storytellers especially, I like to do some sort of lesson. And I'm doing air quotes here. It's more of a discussion. I like to have the teens talk about as much as they can. And then I fill in the gaps in their knowledge. But I really like to have them be the ones that are kind of running the show a little bit. This is their experience, not mine. So making sure that they have what they need to learn and then to set them free and let them do it. So you can see there that it's, we talked about the elements of fiction and then we do a free reader, a free write, and that's optional for them. Either one is fine with me. I mean, I'm sure it's fine with you guys too. So we also then do an optional feedback and share session. And you'd be surprised for the storytelling, especially that the kids are really excited to share their work and to actually listen and get that constructive feedback from their peers. So it's pretty amazing to watch that process. If you need this template, I can always send this out to everybody too if you're interested in this. Yeah, I think I remembered when I looked on the conference website from last fall that you had a couple of different, in addition to the presentation and their handout section, a couple of different documents there. I was one of them when you were talking about the permission. Yes, yes. So the documents that should have been with the bridging boarders conference information would have been that template and then also the permission forms for parents to fill out. Yeah, definitely. We can post them with the archives for today's show as well. Yeah, if you just email them to me and along with the slides here, then I'll go up there as well. Now something I think I forgot to mention this morning when we do put up our recordings for the show, we have obviously the recording, but then if there is any documentation that presenters have slides, handouts, whatever, we have those available as well for you afterwards. So we'll have that all up too. Sounds good. So this slide shows the things that we have had to date, the camps that we've had to date. So our first two were digital direction and game generation. So digital direction was really our tech. One, we focused on 3D printing. We did some activities with the OsoBots. We did movie making. We looked at Photoshop, all kinds of different tech things. And that was quite the adventure because we actually set up a whole bunch of Mac computers in our warehouse over at our branch library lab. So you'll see a picture of that at the very end of this slideshow. And it was very interesting to try and get all of that put together there. Game generation is one of my favorites because I'm a board game nerd. And so this is all about creating a board game. And so each person would create a pitch for their board game and then we would break off into teams based on whose pitches were the most popular. And then we would have an actual board game created by the end of the week. So I'll put back, this slide actually shows one of the completed board games. It's called Chef Roberto. And so you can kind of see there how much work the kids put into it. They've made their own cards. They made their own concepts, boards, 3D printed meeple to play with. Quite the endeavor. Yes. It is pretty amazing. Awesome. So one of the most popular ones that we've had, and I know this is something that's been huge lately in libraries as escape rooms. And so I didn't want the kids to just come in and do an escape room. So for their project, for the escape room project, they had to create their own escape room. They had to start from scratch with we've used elements of storytelling. They had to talk about what their story was, why does it all fit in, and then design it with the puzzles and all the props. And this one is especially hard for a lot of our teams because we basically put them into teams as soon as they get in the room the very first day. Some of them might have friends, some of them might not. And we kind of do a little pitch session where they say, I wanna work kind of like on a sci-fi room or I wanna work on a fantasy room. And then we put them together like that. So it's definitely an exercise in team building and seeing how people work together and being critical thinkers and working with your teammates. So that's an adventure and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. Storytellers, this one is we look at different writing styles and then everybody gets a chance to work on their own writing. A lot of times in school, they don't have a chance to do that. They don't have a chance to explore in depth these writing styles or they don't get a chance to do a lot of free writing. And so we wanted to really let them do that. Surprisingly, this is one of our most well-attended camps, the Storytellers one, and it is always full of the wait list. And so we'll, I have a couple of interviews at the later slides where we'll talk to Junie and Paul a little bit about what they thought about Storytellers as well. DIY Dare, this one is, you see projects online or videos online, that's really what this was. We split it up into different days. So it would be like art. And then the next day was outdoor projects or the next one was nerdy projects. And so we would use all kinds of different things. And so this picture on the right-hand side here is of the pixel art with the wooden blocks. And they just worked on their own DIY projects. At the end of the experience on Friday, the last day, they split up into teams and built little free libraries to put around the town. So that was one of the, that's one of that one. And how to survive is, this one, I think I will probably end up splitting into two separate ones because really what I wanted is, I wanted it to be a kind of apocalyptic game where they had to role play a little bit. And I think that people were not ready for that. So I might split it into two where it's eco-friendly projects. And then another one that's apocalyptic survival. But for this one, we did make solar ovens and we did jam making and we made hard tack, which was hilarious to watch. They cooked it in their solar ovens. That did not go over well. But that's okay. That's fine. God, how long would that take? Goodness. It didn't take. We had one of the kids that said, I'll just take it home and cook it in the oven. So it was pretty funny. This year our new camps for this session are going to be Oregon Trail. We're gonna try and do a live action Oregon Trail, which might have some more of these eco-friendly projects in there and be a little bit more structured that way. And then we're also adding in a Dungeons and Dragons camp this year. So we had a lot of interest from our kids, as I'm sure a lot of you have as well on getting involved with that. And so we're gonna have some different projects, like dice making, but also things traditional to D&D, which are like character creation and then storytelling elements go into that as well. Yeah, you can do a whole afternoon on character creation, unfortunately. Oh, for sure. For sure. My husband and I play, so I know that. Yeah, so a lot of those topics, I wonder, especially the Oregon Trail and everything. My brain just starts thinking as an adult who did these things and does them, do you get any interest from adults saying, well, I wanna do a cool Oregon Trail thing. I played it when I was a teenager or I played D&D. I know that's not your area, but is that a potential? Yeah, that's an interesting question. We have talked a little bit about doing adult camps, but we haven't really figured out what that looks like yet, especially since we know so many of our adults are gonna be at work during the times that we would have available to do these camps. For sure, yeah. But we have really talked about that in pretty in-depth. And so I was gonna talk about this at the end, but since we're on the topic, we did expand quite a bit our offerings this year because the teen camps have been so successful at our library. We are planning on doing a elementary school version that's going to be focused on steam stuff and science things. And then we are also going to open up two tween camps. And so those will be offered to our younger kids because we, like I talked about a little earlier, we saw a pretty significant jump in the amount of people who were registering kids that were not 12 and eight through 18. We had some as young as eight that were trying to register for these teen camps. And so we saw that there was a need. And so we're going to try and do some extra stuff for them and get some new camps going. So we'll have, I believe, I'll have my 14 camps. There will be two camps for elementary and then there will also be two camps for tweens this year. So I'm not doing all of them. I'm only doing the teen camps. That's too much. Yes. So this is kind of the slide about what works for us. What has really been the highlight of how these camps function. One of those things is the rotating camps. So we want to make sure that it's fresh and we're presenting things that people want to be a part of. And so storytellers has really been one of the staples. I do that one every year now. But other than that, they have been rotating in and out. After this year, I will have my full roster for a while, I think, and I will just rotate back into doing, like digital direction will come back through or game generation will come back through. And just making sure that they stay fresh, but also we do have people who come every year. And so we want to make sure that those kids are not getting the same experience every year. Not that they would, because the camps are always different and exciting and teens, but that's something that we want to do. Group size is super important as well. If teen is a lot of teens, a lot of teens in one space for four hours. And so any more than that is way too many. I think we all probably can feel that in our hearts and our souls that, you know, that's a big group. And it's okay with the two adults as long as there are two of us there. And not every teen is able to come every day. And so that's okay too. But they usually break up into their groups and are working on their projects. This picture on the right is of escape rooms. And so they're working on their props for building their escape room. We always want to do registration. That's a super important thing because we can't have drop-ins for this. It just would be chaos. We'd have 40 teens and then that'd be sad. And that's why we try and offer as many camps as we can. The four is pretty much my limit, because that's half of my work week, or that's my entire work week basically, for four weeks of summer. So we want to make sure that we have registration for these. And then we always are evolving our registration. This year we are going to try something where we say only register for one camp. And hopefully we will make it so that people aren't registering for all four. I have had instances where people register for all four and show up for none. And so that makes things a little tricky when you're trying to call the waitlist people and seeing who's available to come in if they want to come in. So mixing the individual and group work is really important as well, just to keep everybody sane. A lot of these teens have not had the opportunity to work with their peers on an extensive project like this. And so they do need breaks to work on their own things. We have, if you look back at that template, there are breaks put in there, but there are also kind of like brain breaks, like the story cubes would be a brain break or write a little writing prompt. And that is something that we do to kind of break things up and let people work individually instead. We talked a lot about already the problem solving and teamwork part of it. But one of the things I want to highlight here is that these projects are the teens projects. I'm there, but I'm kind of there as like a cheerleader or an advisor. I am not like in their project with them. I sit back, I let them run the show. If I see problems that might come up, then I might say, hey, have you thought about this? Or I see you and your team are having some struggles. Why don't we talk about it? Do you need someone on one time and we can talk about what's going on with your group? Or just things like that to help them through things, but really my involvement after everything's planned and running is pretty low. I will hang out with them and, you know, a lot of my time is spent answering, where is the tape? So, and that happens all the time. But that gives me chance to, the camps are kind of fluid. So even though they're planned very rigidly, they're always changing, which we'll talk about in a second. The camp at the library is another really great thing. It's a central location for a lot of people and we have the two branches. So it makes it easy for people to come to both places. And it's just kind of an iconic place. People are like, oh, the library, I know where that is. It's easy to get to, you know. And so we have space, we have rooms and it's been really quite ideal to have the library be the location. Not only because of that though, but also because these teens, a lot of them that sign up for the camps, they don't, they might not be regulars. This thing will probably be people from outside your sphere of regular teams as well. I mean, of course we have regulars that sign up, but a lot of these kids I never see or have known until I see them the first day of camp. And so it's a really cool experience for them to come in and see this is the library. Oh, I can hang out here. Oh, look at all of these things. And you also get to see then a staff member working with them and kind of being that cheerleader role model for them and just that experience, that impactful moment that you get to have with these teens. So the other thing that I, we talked about already is the camp release forms. That works super well. That way parents know exactly what they're getting into. We send that out a week before they send it back to me signed with either photo release or no photo release. Also we have allergies on there. There's very specific information about pickup and drop off about all that good stuff. So just making sure that the teens are prepared. We know where they're going. We know who their emergency contact is. You know, cause they are in our care for quite a long time. I mean, I think most of us probably have an unintended child policy. Ours is 10 and under can't be alone. So these teams that are coming into the library are operating as their own individuals now. So that's why the parents signed the release form. We also have giveaways that we have every year. We give away a journal to them at the beginning, especially for storytellers. That one's important. And then the last few years we have done lanyards. There are water bottles and bags as well. You can see in this picture on the right, the lanyards that they wear. And they wear those every day during camp. And then also when they're out in the library. And that helps for the other library staff to know, these are the camp guys or, you know, oh, these students are the camp students. And so we should see what they're up to. And I do give, I don't give staff instructions, but I asked staff, they see people with green lanyards that, you know, interact with them a little bit and ask how their project's going or what are you working on? And it's just really funny to see the teens come back and be like, a librarian talked to me. They asked me about things. And they're just like in awe that that is a thing that happened, that it all cared, you know? So it's pretty funny when I send them out to do stuff. And then they come back with like, these weird people are out there and they're still talking about us and all our cool stuff. And I don't know how I feel about that. But I start to develop relationships with other librarians too. And that's really cool. It's, yeah, we're nice people really. Well, and it's nice when, you know, when you're a teen librarian, and I don't know how many of you are, but when you're a teen librarian, a lot of times you're the point of contact. You're the one that they always are going to interact with. And everybody else just kind of maybe doesn't snub them, but maybe gives them a wider go around. That's what I see in our staff a lot of times is that they kind of were like, oh, it's the teens, let's just go this way instead. And so it's nice when they actually get some time with other staff members and to really build the response. I will say that we are right next to a train track. So there is a train coming and it's going to be loud for a second maybe. If your mic picks it up or not. Yeah. So the things that don't work, we kind of talked about some of these mornings. We don't do any morning camps anymore. That was a terrible idea. I don't know what I was thinking. Here it comes. Can you hear it? Yeah, just faintly, yes. Okay, okay, then I'll keep talking. If you can not hear it, that's okay then. So one thing that we've had trouble with in the past is working with presenters and partners. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more at the end and how that can work better for your library than it did for mine. But what we did is during our first digital direction, I didn't feel super confident in doing all of the tech things. And so I had people come in and present each day. And then I would present one of those days. But what I found is that even though these people were knowledgeable, they didn't really get it. Like they didn't get why they were coming in to talk to these teens. And that's on me for not maybe helping them feel more involved. But it really is like you make a connection with these kids and then here's some other person and they're like dead zone. They aren't there, they aren't connected to these kids. And so that was hard. That was one of the toughest ones that I've done. Just, they all have different presenting styles too. And so, like I said, at the end, I have how can you adapt this for your library? And so I will talk a little bit more about how maybe presenters could work for you even though they didn't work for me. One thing that I do, I'm kind of a control freak. And so I plan every camp to the minute. If you look at that template, you'll see that it's broken down into minutes on the storyteller side. And that's great. I will keep doing that. I will always do that. But I will also know that this is a very fluid process. And I'm not going to be like, okay, it is now 11.52, we must move on. It's more of a, just so I know that I have enough things to be filled in for that four hours, cause it's a long time. But also being flexible enough to know, okay, the kids are having fun working on their pixel art. I'm not gonna make them move on to the next project because they're working and they are really enjoying what they're doing. So being flexible enough to cut things out, being flexible enough to change things and making sure that you can keep on keeping on. One of the things that might be difficult for people, we are lucky to have enough rooms in our library. Some people I know only have a room or maybe don't have any room. So small spaces are kind of tough when you have 15 teens in a space. And so just making sure that there is a space for them. We did have one time where we were put into a very tiny room that was only meant for 12 people and then there were like 16 teens and then me and our presenter and another person helping me. And it was just like everybody was walking on each other. So that is something that might be difficult to work around depending on how your library functions. But there's always options, you know, and you can always figure something out if you have even a table and you just have 14s each time or something like that. Again, we'll talk about all the different things that we adjust at the end here. And then being to elaborate, I talked about how to survive and how I should have split them into two camps and not have a survival game built in with all of the eco things. Yeah, that didn't go well. So you might think that it's the best game ever or the best camp ever, but just remember to always edit. Just always pare down a little bit. So the challenges, a lot of these we've already talked about. So I won't go into too much detail. Length is definitely a challenge. And one of those things that we'll talk about is how to adjust when we get to the end. Having the two locations is really problematic. Fortunately, we have hired a programming librarian for our LAD branch. And so now we do have more supplies over there that are just readily available. But last year, when I went over to do the escape room project, I went over and I forgot to bring scissors. And they had one pair, one pair in the entire building. And I was like, what's happening here? So that was problematic. But we have to haul everything. We used to have to haul everything from our downtown branch to LAD, our other branch. And that can get to be some truncles. We did talk about age differences and maturity levels. You definitely can see the difference, as you know, in those 12 year olds versus those 17 year olds. And it's just a matter of finding a good balance and making sure that everybody is staying open-minded. We haven't really had a whole lot of problems with that. More it's like working abilities and one person might be more goofy or one person might be more bossy. And just those are the things that seem to get in the way more than necessarily the age groups. So just something to think about and just always I'm always kind of keeping an ear on the groups to see how they're doing and if there might be some stripe happening in their groups. Because you do come up against like different learning abilities as well. Things that, you know, they might not be visible. So maybe dyslexia or we had one kiddo this year who couldn't, she couldn't write, but she loved to tell stories orally. And so we tried trying to figure out how can we make sure that she's involved and how do we make sure that she can still be a participant. And so my other staff person would, when we had free write time for storytellers would just have her dictate her stories and then write them for her. And that really worked well. And just trying to figure out how all of that works. Or we have some people who might have severe stage fright. And so even though I want them to get that public speaking experience, it's really hard for them. And so we try and figure out ways around that. Just always being flexible. And you know, as a teen librarian or, you know, even as a children's librarian, it's all about flexibility and everything, everything can change in a day, right? And that's what we're living in right now. Really, the peer engagement and the group work, that's always gonna be a challenge. Because some of these kids have never actually worked with a group ever. And so it's definitely a challenge for them. And it's an interesting challenge for the staff members to see how we can help them work through those, maybe, tips that they're having or creative differences, if you will. And we talked about keeping it fresh. Parents are sometimes fun. I won't go too much into that because you all know, you all know that one. It's some interesting folks. And then we always, I am the primary planner, presenter and creative mind behind the team camps. And it's only me. And then I get a seasonal maybe, but they haven't done any of the work or anything like that. They're just an extra body. And so that is sometimes a problem. But again, it might just be you. It might always just be you. And so we'll talk about that, maybe. Okay, so this is the really important slide. This is the next two are the really important ones. And I've been talking a lot about how these camps look and what they're about. And that really doesn't tell you why. Why do you care? Why do you want to have camps instead of your traditional programming? And here's why. You can kind of read through these and we've talked a lot about them. I love, I love, I love doing the camps because it is amazing to watch these young people be their own people. It's such an incredible journey. You can see so much growth over the week just of them being independent, them being creative, them feeling like they have a voice, making sure that they are their own people. And that's why the camps are so important. Because in school, the schools do such a great job, but they can only do so much. And they're trying to hit requirements. They're trying to hit those grade level reading. They're trying to hit, let's get you ready for this test. And the teams that I have worked with when I've gone into the schools have had zero chance to be creative, zero chance to actually explore things that might be interesting to them. And so that's why these camps are so important. Just to learn those life skills, learn those soft skills that we talked about, working as a team, working with adults, working with their peers. I mean, it's such a learning experience for all of them. But it's also a really cool thing to see them over time become those library advocates, see them really start to grow into people that are going to be those lifelong learners, going to be those library supporters in the future. And that's because we're there for them. It's because they're getting a true connection with the library and they're getting a true connection with library staff. And they're getting to see what we have to offer. They get to see that we have a 3D printer. They get to see that we have spaces that they can use. They get to see, this is my home. I can be here and I can come back. And that's a really cool thing. It's really nice too, because we get to see so many people come through the doors, so many kids that we've never seen before. And we get to hear their stories. And one of my passions in this field is getting to help those who might not get to come to the library. I really love working with the group homes and things like that and being able to help them stay involved. And they still feel such a connection to the library, even though they might not be able to join us at the library. They might not be able to come here. And so it's really just cool to see the difference that we make in the community as well. And that's such a huge thing for us as librarians. So that kind of brings me to, this is a big impact for the community as well. It's not just the teens, it's also us as librarians. It's also the parents who couldn't afford maybe to send their kids to camp before and now they have an opportunity to do that because we offer them for free. We offer a full week long camp and it's at no cost to these parents. So we're reaching people who couldn't offer these opportunities before. We make sure that there's times so that we can have the parents drop off their kids at lunchtime and then pick them up at dinnertime or when they're off of work. And of course our libraries are open until 8 p.m. So if they do need to stay a little later, that's an option. We're at the both locations. So both sides of our large sprawling community can have access. And then we do reach those kids in the group homes as well. And so they might have barriers to library access but we're making sure to get out to them as well. We also are reaching them, reaching teens in general with more emergent technologies that they might not have access to yet or they might not know about in schools or maybe they're really interested in those 3D printers but they just can't do it while they're in school. Getting to really have a deep dive on learning and how to work together with those things as well. Work together with new technology. This picture on the right is of a deconstruction day. And so we had staff donate old gross things and then the kids took them apart to see how they worked. I mean, we had a vacuum. I would not advise taking a vacuum. It was really disgusting. Oh, yeah, I don't wanna know what's inside my vacuum cleaner. No, and then it kind of exploded a little bit, not like the vacuum itself but the dirt in the vacuum exploded and it went everywhere. Oh, that was so gross. But this is a speaker and so they're kind of looking at how does it work and all of that cool stuff. And they took it all apart and did it themselves. So we talked a little bit about accommodating those skill levels and abilities. We have so many kids and there's so many different things that they need help with and just being there but also just making sure they feel like they're included. So that's why the camps are so important to me and why I feel like there's such a huge part of our community just to feel that community need that a lot of people had, a lot of working parents, a lot of our communities under poverty, under the poverty range. And so it's just, you know, camps can range from $500 and $600 for a week long camps like that. And the fact that we work for free is pretty impactful. So I just wanna touch, I know we're running close on time. So I just wanna touch on the interview with Junie and Paul. They are two of the campers that were at all of my camps a couple years ago. They came to every single one and I love them both for it. And so I asked them, I was like, what do you guys think? I wanna hear your feedback on these things because you were at every camp and they were happy to sit down and tell me all about it. They love storytellers, which I was super surprised by because that was the first year we had done the escape room project too and that was the new sparkly thing. And so I was like, oh, they like storytellers best. That's really weird. They also wanted to have longer camps. And I was like, guys, that's some, that can't happen. That's my limit right here. We're not, we can't go any longer than that. Well, that's your victim of your success. They don't want it. They never want it to end. Yup, that's exactly right. Yup, this is how they are kind of the testimonial on how I knew that everybody was gonna be okay with their peers because they said, I asked them about that. I was like, point blank, do you feel like it was awkward to work with this 18 year old or do you feel like it was awkward to work with this 12 year old? And they were like, no. And one of my favorite quotes was from Paul and he said, we're all just people, right? And it was so great. I just touched my heart. My God, my heart. Yeah, it was just so perfect. It was just so perfect. And I was like, well, all right then, I can get behind that. We did create an entire camp based on their direct feedback as well. DIY Dare was created for them basically because they had said, I wanna do something like that. So we did, we did. And that one went really well. It was one of the more expensive camps that we did, I will admit, but they had a great time. All of the teens did. So the other thing though that really came out of this interview was the fact that both of them said something along the lines of, I felt like I was doing something important. I felt like I was accomplishing something. And the one thing that Junie said that really touched me was this last quote here. He said, I felt like I was finding something in me. Like I had the chance to experience something cool and that I could grow from it. So that's, it was really quite the experience getting to talk to these two. And Paul has come back for, he's been in almost all of my camps for the last three years now. So just to see how Paul has changed is amazing. It's really a cool experience. It's kind of outcomes that you don't plan for or really think that, yeah. We're in your goals or curriculum outcomes, but there it is. And so this is just kind of more of the importance of why this is such a good program. Those problem solving, project-based learning, developing self-confidence and self-esteem. And they're able to do that without any fear of being ridiculed or anything like that. I make sure to establish at the start that this is a safe place. We don't, we can offer constructive criticism, but we don't with the word, I just lost my words, but we don't say anything negative to people that's hurtful. Making sure that those economic barriers are going on for people and just engaging with the community. The teens get so many opportunities to do things like that with the how to survive. They actually spent some of the afternoon picking up trash around the library and just seeing how much garbage they brought in. And they had people come out of their apartment buildings and say, thank you for doing that, that's so great. So they get a sense of pride from that too. And just seeing them be able to be their own leaders, their own innovators, being the creative people that we know they are, they just need a chance to kind of shine. So I do want, I know we're running short on time, so I do wanna talk about how to adapt a camp for your library. And these are just some ideas. I mean, obviously I don't know all of the libraries. My home library is in a town with 3000 people and it's one librarian and one director basically. So I do know how all of that feels. I've worked in those libraries as well. So I wanna talk about this and these might be helpful for you. They might be things that you can work off of as well. I don't have a solution for every library obviously, but just some thoughts. One of the things that could be beneficial is to still do an adjusted schedule. You don't have to do the five days a week for four hours. That's a lot. That's a lot for any library. That's a lot for me and this is my sole purpose in life right now. So ways that you can still keep that camp feel is to do maybe slightly extended programs. Do like a two to three hour instead and it's just on a day. So maybe it's like a day camp. Or you could do an hour program but have it be a theme for three days a week or something like that. Where it maybe instead of doing those once a week teen programs, maybe it's just one hour for three days in a row to keep it kind of cohesive. The other thing is to try and take one or two more complex projects because I feel like that's really the meat and potatoes of these camps is to have them work on something that's gonna be more difficult. Something that's more complex. Something that's gonna give them the problem solving creative abilities by working on those projects. So focus on one or two of those instead of doing maybe like two a session or two for every day of the week. And then that helps to kind of pare it down a little bit as well. We talked about partners earlier. The way that I think partners can work is if you have maybe like you have a 4-H group or maybe you have a Girl Scout troop or maybe you have a really cool person in your community that just knows a lot of things and maybe partner with them and have them help you with the planning. Have them help you with the actually the behind the scenes part of the camp. And I think by doing that then your community partner is invested as well. You get double the advertising, you know, and then they have even built an audience, some of them. So like if you didn't work with a 4-H group or another member of the community that we have a lot of little individual people that I can think of that do things that are steam related or stem related. And just finding that community partner that best fits your needs and then work make sure that you work with them to come up with things. I do have one that I thought was really cool the Dayton Metro library system. They have started doing camps as well and they do it where it's like a career path. And so they partner with community organizations that are the workforce. And then it's almost like a mini internship that they do and they work with different companies in their area. So that would be one that's really cool to check out. And then you have- That also would help with the problem you were having with some of these outside partners not knowing why they were there. But you didn't have that earlier. Yeah. The main thing though is kind of what I talked about is to make sure that it feels cohesive. That's kind of like there needs to be a connecting thread. It doesn't really matter the length of time. It doesn't really matter how many days. As long as it's more than one hour I think that you're gonna have a feel for a camp. Like as long as it's kind of like a series or maybe it's something that you've already are doing. Like maybe you have a series of steam programming for kids or teens and that you're, you know just switch the days so that they're all in a row instead of once a week. And then you already are moving more towards a camp feel. And then just sometimes branding even is an easy way to give it more of a camp experience. Oh, this might be the picture slide. It is. Okay. I was like it's loading really slow. So this last one is just a bunch of pictures of what we created over this last few years. So I'm gonna go left to right and just kind of tell you briefly about what they are. That first upper left hand corner one that's the kids making hard tack. Then down below that's the warehouse where we did digital erection where we set up all the Mac computers. So you can see all of the beams and stuff. We tried to make it look as you can see there's some gray paneling in the back that we set up so it didn't seem quite so gross. But that was, we had to make do with the space that we had and that was the space up above is a pop-up book that one of the teens made and it was absolutely gorgeous. She was wonderful. And just that was one of our quick projects that was supposed to be a quick one and she worked on it for probably three days instead. So just doing all of the etching and cutting out by hand and writing the story, it was amazing. Below you can see another one of the games that the kids built. It was a vampire game where they had to reach the top of a warehouse before the sun came up and get to their coffins. So that was pretty neat. The middle picture up above, this is one of the teens that I've probably had one of the hardest struggles with. She came in and was basically non-verbal. She would not respond to anything that we said to her. She wouldn't work with anybody. And so just trying to figure out what's going on with this kiddo, is she just extremely shy? What's happening? And by the end of it, the last day, we did a cardboard challenge and she made herself a robot costume out of cardboard and was showing it off to everybody who would see her. And then she walked out of the library wearing it and it was the most amazing thing. And then you can see below, this is the kids working on their little free libraries that they were decorating. This one was, oh goodness, I just lost the game. Anyway, it doesn't matter, but they're working on their little free libraries and then up above, you can see them doing the drilling of the little free libraries and they did all of it. They made it all. So learning how to use drills and hand tools and things like that too. Anyway, I went over, I'm so sorry. No, no, it's fine. And actually I mentioned that to people. We officially, our show goes for an hour, but we go as long as it takes to get through this and for any questions or comments anybody has. And everyone is still on with us that came in. And I'll just remind you guys too, nobody has said anything as we've been talking. But if you do have any questions or comments you formally, type it in, let us know. Oh, wait patiently. All right, so. You have to do it. Oh, wait, when do we get here? I'm just looking at it. I got to grab the box. Okay, we do have one question now. Yes, can you share some of your week long plans? Sure, yeah, I can add long. So what I'll say about that is that they get a little messy. So I am happy to show you what they are, but it's a fluid document that I change every day as we're working based on how much time we're taking on a certain project. So they don't look very nice, I will say that. There's lots of notes on them as well. So I can try and clean them up and send them to you though. Yeah, is there one in particular that you're interested in? I don't know, she says messy is fine. Yeah, so Amber, reach out to her, send an email to Molly there and she can get you some more of the details on them. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Storytelling or digital directions is what she was looking at, yeah. Thankfully, those are the least messy, so that'll be good. So yeah, anybody else have any questions or comments? Go ahead and type in. This was great, this sounds like a lot of fun and like I was saying earlier, things, so many things happening in libraries and what you're doing is another one that I wish we were around when I was a kid or a teen. Yeah, I know. I'm telling you, yell as an adult that I can't do now. You weren't wrong, because I mean, secretly I want to do all of the camps that I create too. I mean, I do them based on feedback from the teens, but really I want to do them as well. I'm here, yes. I'll share your motives. Right. All right. I don't know, it doesn't look anybody's typed anything and yet, so I think that's fine. Yeah, if you do have any questions, you want to know more about what she has been doing, contact Molly there. There's your email and phone number. When we do get this posted up for the archives, that'll be on there as well if you missed it this time. So thank you so much, Molly. And everyone. Yes, thanks for coming in. Yeah, I am gonna pull back, present your control to my screen now. Hopefully, there we go. Is that out of the way? All right, yeah. All right, so that is our today's show. As I said, we are recording and I'm gonna get back to our Encompass Live main page. This is our main page for the show. The archive should be available as long as both GoToWebinar and YouTube cooperate with me. In our Archive Encompass Live shows section down here, if you click on this link or it beneath our upcoming shows, it gives you our archives. Most recent ones on the top. So today's will be right up there at the top. And when you go into it, there'll be a link similar to this one with a link with the recording. This is last week's show and a link to the presentation. And then if whatever other handouts you send to me, Molly, we'll have those links as well. Sounds good. We, yeah, so all of that will be up there. I'll let everybody know when the recording is available. And while we're here on the archive shows, I will mention we do have a search feature here so you can search our archives for any particular topics or presenters or libraries that you're interested in watching the shows. Note we do have where you can search it, the whole thing or just most recent 12 months. This is our full archives for Encompass Live. We started the show in January, 2009. So we are 10 years in now and all of our recordings and archives are here. So you will find some things that are old, outdated, information, just pay attention and services and products might not exist anymore or may have changed completely, URLs may be wrong, take that all into consideration. Just note the date of when something was originally broadcast when you watch a show. Certain shows will remain eternal, like best new teen books of 2017. They're probably still good books today, but certain things may have updated. So just pay attention when you are watching any of our archives there. We do have a Facebook page, Fran Compass Live. If you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We post reminders two times a week about the upcoming shows and when the recordings are available. Those reminders are logged into today's show. Excuse me. And just go down. Links reminder, you'll let people know when the recordings are available. So if you do like to keep up with us on Facebook, you can. We also have a hashtag. This is your Encompass Live, a little abbreviation that we use when we post things on Twitter and Instagram and elsewhere if you want to keep up on what we're doing there. So this is our schedule for the next month or so at the moment. As I said at the beginning, we are going on with the show because we are able to do all of this remotely, being online. I am going to be reaching out to all my presenters. I've not had a chance for that yet to make sure and see if they are definitely still gonna be available on the dates they're scheduled for. So the dates may change, topics may change. Just keep an eye on it here and see how things go. Next week's show is supposed to be our pretty sweet tech. As you can see here, there's multiple ones of that. This is our, excuse me, Technology Innovation Librarian Amanda Sweets does a monthly show of something tech focused. And she is scheduled next week to talk about chatbots, doing a demonstration of that, how you can create your own. That should be really fun, I think. So look for anything that says pretty sweet tech and log in join us for that one and any of our other upcoming shows. But as I said, some of these scheduling may change, depending on presenters availability, considering the current situation. So just keep an eye on it and we'll update you as things do come in change. So thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Molly, for joining us from next door. Yeah, thank you, Iowa. And hopefully we'll see you in another episode of Encompass Live. Everybody be safe, be smart and flatten the curve. Bye-bye.