This month, ICPL Teens craft theme is going green, so stop by Meeting Room B this Friday, November 12th anytime between 4:30 and 6:00 pm to create something out of recycled materials. There will be supplies, and you are welcome to bring your own as well!
Here are some pictures of our October creations. Enjoy!
Tamara, McKinley, Ellen, Darian, and Kim's Cupcakes
In the TAG meeting yesterday, we created Cupcake Monsters from the book What’s New Cupcake? by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, using some colored frosting, gummy peach rings, M&Ms, suckers, and candy corn. I loved all the cupcakes, but Naftalia’s spaceship inspired this FotoFlexer work of art:
Tomorrow is Tuesday, which means it is the second to last program for ICPL teens this summer! We will be hanging out in Meeting Room A from 2-3p.m., discussing our what we’ve read this summer with the Teen Advisory Group (TAG). There will also be delicious snacks and a super exciting prize giveaway….and the possibility of an ICPLTeencast, so if you’re itching to talk books, please join us!
TAG Meeting Minutes
3/2/10
11:30 – 1:00
Meeting Room B
WHO WAS THERE
Darian, Zoe, Shecharya, Derek, Naftalia, David, Rachel, Jason, Brian
RECRUITING NEW MEMBERS
You had some great ideas for recruiting new TAG members! Here they are, in no particular order:
Make posters to hang up at school
Distribute fliers to friends & members of existing clubs
Flash Mob / Flash Freeze, followed by flier distribution
Wear banana suit on ped mall, followed by flier distribution
Make TAG bookmarks and distribute at ICPL
Give TAG applications to all Summer Reading Program participants
Bake sale: make cakes and/or pizzas that say “TAG”
Create Facebook Group and invite Facebook Friends to join TAG
Advertise on local radio & TV (The Library Channel?)
Hire Skywriter / Blimp to advertise TAG
Invite existing ICPL Volunteers to join TAG
Word of mouth — invite your friends!
At the April TAG meeting we’ll decide which ideas we like best (and are most realistic )and start working on them.
UPCOMING EVENTS
YES, we are on for a gelato-making tour at Capanna in April! This might be a registration-only event with limited openings — we’ll keep you posted. We’ll try to make sure TAG doesn’t conflict with prom on 4/17.
In May we’ll have a ginormous party and play outdoorsy games such as tag, hide-and-go-seek, sardine, and kickball.
ECO SUMMER READING PROGRAM
Your eco give-away & event ideas:
Bike accessories (bells, water bottles, etc.)
Seed packets
eBook gift certificates
Gift certificates to erase library fines
Bike day! Bike safety, bike repair, helmet decorating
Invite master gardener to give presentation
Produce “Horticulture Friday” teencast
Learn how to make handmade paper & altered (note)books
BLOG & PODCAST STATS Some of you were wondering if anyone ever reads the blog or listens to the podcast. WELL! This month the blog has had 2621 unique visits by real people, and the most recent podcast has been downloaded, played directly from the blog, or picked up via RSS feed 113 times!
…AND OTHER STUFF
Brian is going to start planning and attending some teen events!
TAG members expressed interest in having a greater influence on library decisions. We will explore ways to make this happen, including the possibility of TAG contributing input to the Library Board.
Someone asked if 18 & 19 year-olds can participate in TAG, even if they have already graduated from highschool. We’ve never considered this before! We’ll keep this in mind when recruiting for next year’s TAG.
TAG Meeting Minutes
1/9/10
1:30 – 3:00
Meeting Room B
WHO WAS THERE
Emma, Erin, David, Zoe, Kim, Rachel, Jason
ANIME FEST
Anime Fest 2010 is coming! This year’s fest will be on Saturday February 13, and will feature anime film screenings, J-Pop music, DIY bento boxes, and books talks about our favorite manga (à la David and Kim). Meanwhile, Emma has agreed to blog about anime vs. manga, and maybe Erin will even tell us what she thinks of Yotsuba… — thanks everyone! Email teens@icpl.org if you have any other ideas to make this year’s Anime Fest the most amazing ever.
FAHRENHEIT 451
ICPL is launching The Big Read of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 on February 1st! TAG’s contribution to this huge community event is going to be another one of our thoughtful and poignant podcasts (you know, the ones where we discuss G.I. Joe super powers and “Blawesome”-ness). So get reading ASAP — it’s really short! — and come with your radio voices to February’s TAG meeting. David is going to blog about upcoming Fahrenheit 451-ness in late January, and Kim will keep the blog posts coming in February.
UPCOMING EVENTS
So another year of TAG is halfway over We are still going to try to fit in a movie night, gelato-making tour, and playground games extravaganza (including the game “tag.”) We are thinking March = movie night, April = gelato-making tour, and May = outdoorsy end-of-the-year bash. Stay tuned for more info!
ECO SUMMER READING PROGRAM
What are your ideas for Eco SRP? We brainstormed a few ideas at the meeting, including a bike repair workshop, an ICPL community garden, and reusable water bottle giveaways. Email teens@icpl.org with your Eco SRP ideas, or just leave us a comment!
TAG Meeting Minutes
12/1/09
4:30 – 6:00
ICPL Meeting Room E
WHO WAS THERE
Kim, Darian, Shecharya, Naftalia, Zoe, Alek, Jason, Rachel
PODCAST Yesss, we finally recorded a new podcast! Topics included: New Moon, Life-Threatening Knitting Catastrophes, No Shave November, and Cheese Club. Now that’ we’ve got the recording, it’s time to crank this puppy out. Hop on over to Teen Tech Zone during Winter Break Dec. 21-23 and Dec. 28-31 from 1:00-4:00 if you want to get teched out and earn some volunteer hours.
“CRAFTY TEENS @ HOME EC. WORKSHOP” December’s event is. . . felted soap? OK, I didn’t know what that was either, but it looks pretty awesome! Meet in the ICPL lobby on Saturday Dec. 19 at 12:45 to head over to Home Ec. Workshop and get your craft on. Registration is limited to 15, so sign up here, now!
“THE BIG READ”: FAHRENHEIT 451 The Iowa City Public Library is doing an awesome series of events about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, sci-fi, censorship, and more in February 2010. TAG is going to tackle this book with an amazing and creative project (we just don’t know what it is yet!). Read it over break, finish it up by the January TAG meeting, and we’ll plan something crazy-fun and Fahrenheit 451-related for February’s event.
TAG Meeting Minutes
10/6/09
4:30 – 5:30
ICPL Meeting Room B
WHO WAS THERE
Kim, Darian, Shecharya, Naftalia, Jason, Rachel
VOLUNTEER HOURS
So I need to know how many hours you spent on TAG-related activities in September, as well as August. How many hours did you spend at TAG meetings & events, working on podcasts, and writing blog posts? Let me know by this Tuesday (Oct. 13) at the latest. If you don’t tell me how many hours you volunteered, then I can’t give you credit — and that would be sad.
“VIDEO GAME SHOWDOWN”
This is happening ideally some Saturday in November from 1-3:00 p.m. Keep your little eyeballs peeled for the official date, coming soon. We’ll have our November TAG meeting before the tournament, at noon, with pizza. Shecharya has been dubbed the Tournament Master, due to his logistics expertise. There will be prizes! Snacks! And non-video games such as Apples to Apples! I think I also promised Kim that I would bring my cribbage board, so get excited.
HI, NEW MEMBERS!
New members Darian and Naftalia were at Tuesday’s meeting. It was so great to see both of you — you had great ideas for our upcoming events!
PODCASTS / BLOG POSTS
It’s official: Zoe and Shecharya are our Podcast Directors. Kim, David and Darian are our Blog Editors. Keep your eye out for info from them about upcoming podcast / blog projects.
Also, check out the blog for a super write-up by our Scribe, Erin, about the Banned-Books Read In. Emma took photos, which I hope she will share with us on the blog sometime very soon!
A read-in to celebrate our freedom to read occured Thursday. Some topics included, freaky same book covers (see below), and mangos/ other citrus friuts. We tried a variaty of banned books including TTYL, The Stupid’s Die, and The Book of Bunny Suicides. (Can you see a pattern here?) So you may be wondering, “Banned books? Why/ How do they ban a book?” Well, it basicly has to do with the content of the book and some parents complain to take it out of school libraries. The content is usually not “age appropriate” according to them like, in Shel Silverstiens book of poems it “encourages children to break dishes insted of washing them.” Cookies and water were present.
We’re getting ready for Thursday night’s “Banned Books Week” read-in event! Meet us in the teen area from 7-8 p.m. on the 1st and celebrate your right to read. We’ll have some of your favorite banned books available (The Catcher in the Rye, The Golden Compass, TTYL, Gossip Girl, and remember Captain Underpants?) or bring whatever free reading you wish. We’ll have snacks and maybe you can share some thoughts about your freedoms for the teen podcast.
“What is Banned Book Week” you ask? Well it is sponsored by the American Library Association and is a celebration of Intellectual Freedom, the idea that you have the right to “access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular.”
In the United States most of the challenges (an attempt to remove or restrict materials) are made at school and public libraries often by parents and concerned library patrons who believe the materials are not acceptable for the audience (see the charts here). Although some of these challenges are made with the best intentions, we do not believe in restricting access to those materials, we follow the Free Access to Libraries for Minors, an interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights that states, “Librarians and governing bodies should maintain that parents—and only parents—have the right and the responsibility to restrict the access of their children—and only their children—to library resources” (see this for more info).
Too many words for you? How about this video (with puppets):
)and start working on them.
We are still going to try to fit in a movie night, gelato-making tour, and playground games extravaganza (including the game “tag.”) We are thinking March = movie night, April = gelato-making tour, and May = outdoorsy end-of-the-year bash. Stay tuned for more info!
