Duct Tape Mania!
Today I helped our teen librarian out with the Duct Tape Mania program. She had gotten a crate full of duct tape in different colors, rulers (some handmade from cardboard and laminated), folders with various instructions, a few examples already made, all that sort of thing. The room was already set up, but we hit a space crisis only a few minutes into the program – we didn’t have nearly enough tables and we had way too many kids (okay, not really “way too many”, but we needed more space for them!) We wound up with about 30 teens making appearances, and the first part of the program was spent (for me, at least) running around finding more pencils, rulers, scissors, all that sort of thing. Not really a bad problem to have, but it was definitely a bit unexpected – other branches only had five or six kids show up, and we were worried about running out of tape!
The teens seemed to have a lot of fun making different things. There were a fair number of problems with understanding instructions – lots of things were written kind of “hiply” which hindered rather than enhanced understanding. It would have been nice to be able to run through some of the projects more thoroughly before turning the teens loose, and we had to do a bit of translating at several points, but it all worked out. We had one girl come up and show us the very cute blue-and-white purse she made. She said she tried following the instructions but they didn’t make sense, so she just gave up and improvised – awesome!
We also made up little quarter-page handouts with some links to other duct tape craft sites. Only a few of these were taken, but I think it mght have been better to put them out on the tables where kids were actually crafting; as it was they were on the registration table which most kids kind of scanned and ignored.
We did a raffle giveaway for the summer reading prizebooks which is always popular. There were kids hanging around even after they’d finished their craft just to make sure they’d be there when the drawing happened. Teens love books!
All in all, this was a totally successful event. Everyone seemed to have a great time with the craft and really enjoy themselves and there were a lot of really ambitious and well-executed projects going on. More duct tape!