Star Wars Reads Day 2015 at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County

Saturday October 10th was Star Wars Reads Day – one of my favorite holidays of the year! Why? Well for one, I got to dress up like Princess Leia. Of all the princesses I think she is my favorite because she saved Han Solo and Luke Skywalker just as much as they saved her. Never forget that one of her best quotes ever is this: Someone has to save our skins! She then proceeds to do exactly that.

Star Wars Reads Day is also one of my favorite days because it’s really easy to program for. We had a fantastic day at The Public Library of Mt. Vernon and Knox County with a variety of activities for our tweens and teens, many of which we found of course on the high holy programming deity: Pinterest.

We made light sabers out of pool noodles and duct tape. This turned out to be very easy and very popular.

A staff member painted a white trash can to look like R2D2 and we did a bean bag toss. It should be noted that the staff member in question is not me, I could not do this. Look at how fabulous this looks!

We of course made Fortune Cookie Wookiees because how could you not!

Because we have a large number of Legos available for our programming, I put together a variety of Lego challenges for our tweens and teens to do. They were supposed to do various activities in 5 minute challenges, but in the end it turned out they really just wanted to build and play so that’s what I let them do. I have learned over the years that it is important to listen to your audience and be adaptable. Even though they did a free build, many of the participants still ended up building space ships and incorporating Star Wars Lego Minifigures that we bought for our event.

I also created a station that involved using my new favorite thing: The Button Maker! We wanted to do Star Wars Thumb Print Doodles (there is a Klutz book), but I thought we would take it a step further and make buttons out of the doodles. This too proved to be a very popular activity.

I also downloaded some free Star Wars silhouettes from SilhouettesFree.com and combined it with my second new love, the Fused app, to create these cool Star Wars buttons.

The librarians were not the only ones to cosplay, we had several of our kids come in costume or bring fun props.

To be honest, the highlight of the day for the kids was probably when this young lady below walked in and I proclaimed, “Oh my gosh you have great buns!” I totally should have known better after working with tweens and teens for so many years, but I had some genuine bun envy because I don’t have enough hair to do legit Princess Leia buns. Needless to say, there was a lot of snickering.

And because it was Star Wars READS Day, we made sure and had plenty of new Star Wars books on hand for our tweens and teens to check out, and R2D2 was there to lead the way.

It was a great Star Wars Reads Day. Until net year, remember: Read More, You Must!

Filed under: Programming, Star Wars, Star Wars Reads Day