All The New Things!

Hello there everyone!  It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything new over here at NTOPS and I’m sorry about that. I think I was having a little library burnout for awhile and it was making it tough to want to blog (or do much of anything). I guess that’s bound to happen when you’ve been working in libraries as long as I have. But thanks to my awesome boss and amazing coworkers, I got through it and am feeling brand new!

During this “rut” I made a very hard decision.  I decided not to do preschool ST anymore. (I KNOW!) As much as I’ve loved it over the years, I felt it was time to try some new things and branch out a little. And can I just say that I’m so so happy that I did. Now our library has revamped our whole ST session and I get to do baby storytime! I just completed my 3rd one and it’s been growing every single week. Today we were completely full!  It feels so great to be able to offer this to families now because it’s been years since we had a baby ST. I will definitely post more about my individual baby times in the upcoming weeks so you can see what I’m doing 🙂

Another thing I’ve decided to do is help out our teen librarian with her Preteens.  She’s only PT which makes it hard for her to do all the things she wants and I’m more than happy to help out.  We came up with the idea to have a monthly program for tweens. Thus, Preteen Pizza Time was born! Basically we will have pizza (duh) and some kind of activity/craft/movie/games to do.  We’re really hoping it fills that gap where they don’t want a ST anymore, but can’t really go to teen programs.  These poor kids probably feel left out!  Our first one is tomorrow so I will post more about that later.

The last thing I’m SUPER excited about is incorporating STEAM into a program! Our awesome district got a massive STEAM grant and has been able to purchase so many great things to use. I’m going to start hosting a monthly preschool STEAM ST. Little Makers!  So luckily I will still see some prek faces.  This will consist of a story that goes along with our theme, maybe a song, then the rest will be hands on activities for them to do with their families.  I’m really hoping this one takes off!

So these are all the new things I’m working on and I’m really excited to start this new chapter in my library life. Oh, and thanks for still reading/using my blog while I was away. You are all the best!!!

-Nik