GreenBeanTeenQueen

With LibraryCon 3 only two months away, it's about time I wrote about last year's event! Sheesh! But I'm back with lots of LibraryCon notes! You can read about planning LibraryCon Year 2 here . I thought I would devote an entire post to Geeky Storytime at LibraryCon since it's one of the things I get asked most about.  Toddler GreenBean as Batman I have tried hosting Geeky Storytimes as a special evening storytime before (I wrote about those here , here  and the LibraryCon 1 edition here ) For year 2, we decided to utilize our StoryHour Room as a tabletop gaming room, which meant we needed a new spot for Geeky Storytime to kick off LibraryCon. We opted to host it just outside the children's department, as we have an open area there, we could fit more people, and we hoped we could draw more attendees this way. All of that worked out perfectly and just as we had hoped! I started off the storytime with welcoming everyone to LibraryCon and Geeky Storytim

Today is The Very Hungry Caterpillar Day! I can't say enough good things about the beloved book by Eric Carle. I loved it as a child, I loved it again as a librarian, and I love it even more as a parent.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar  is such a great storytime book. There are so many ways to use it! Of course, I love reading it and even adding music and singing as the caterpillar munches his way across the pages. But my most favorite way of telling this story is through our Very Hungry Caterpillar sock puppet.  I'm not sure where the sock puppet idea came from originally at my library as it was made before I started there, but you can see an example of one at Busy Crafting Mama who shared one for Flannel Friday a few years ago. The idea of the storytelling puppet is that you wear the caterpillar sock on your arm and add the various foods as you tell the story and move the food up your arm and then end with a beautiful butterfly! It doesn't matter what age g

Well, I finally have time to sit down and type up all my thoughts about LibraryCon Year 2, or as I lovingly called it, Revenge of the Con!!! LibraryCon 2015 was such a huge success we knew we had to repeat it.  (You can check my posts about our first year here: Part One , Part Two , Part Three) Yet even with that success (400+ in attendance, great feedback from attendees and participants), we realized after the fact that we forgot all about marketing and promoting the Library itself. We figured people would walk into the Library, but with nothing to draw them there and with the entire event being held in our main concourse and meeting rooms, no one actually entered the Library. So the first item up on our planning agenda was to figure out how to promote ourselves. The first suggestion was for us to have a table ourselves. We collected various swag from conferences (with multiple staff attending ALA Annual, we were able to talk to comic publishers there and pick up lots of posters