Robot Building – Part 1

I’m not sure that anyone who isn’t a children’s librarian understands the feelings of being smack in the middle of summer reading with programs happening on a daily (sometimes hourly) schedule, reference questions flying at you a mile a minute, and kids and parents, nannies, grandparents, and tutors in every nook and cranny in the library.  We are in full-swing at my library, our summer program starts in the middle of June and officially ends the Friday before Labor Day.  Which means that for 10-weeks, my life is absolutely crazy.  We’ve got programming for infants through 8th graders (just in our department) with many of our big events attracting 150 – 200 people.  Even our smaller workshops max out around 30 people, and we always have a crowd.
This year we tried a new event called Take Apart Day, which was a huge success.  And with all the pieces parts, plus a lot of recyclables, we’re having a Robot Building Workshop this afternoon.  Our robots won’t be the electronic, mechanical kind – more like using recyclable parts to create really cool robot sculptures.  We’ve got everything from cardboard boxes, egg cartons, 2-liter bottles, cans, bottles, lids, packing materials, cardboard, and paper scraps.  Plus, we raided our craft area and grabbed a lot of things that we only have a couple of – pipe cleaners, pompoms, ribbon, leftover duct tape, and then we can replenish these things as we need to in the future.  We didn’t expect to have so many people interested, but we now have 100 people registered for the even this afternoon!  Eeekkk!  But, we’ve got a ton of fun things to create with and we hope that groups of kids will work together to create some really neat robots.
I’ll report back this afternoon, if I get some time, with how it all went!  Wish me luck!