Cindy Crushes Programming: Five Virtual Programs You Can Do Right Now Part 3, by Cindy Shutts

Teen programming looks a little different for public libraries right now because getting together in groups just isn’t safe so everyone has turned to virtual programming. You can see our previous discussions on virtual programming here, here, here and here. Today we have even more virtual programming ideas for you.

Volunteering

My Co-Worker Faith Healy came up with allowing the teens to write a blog post about what is going on in their lives during this timer whether they are part of a protest or just dealing with living through a pandemic. This will go on our blog once we have enough posts. We want to encourage teens to use their voice. We will give them a half hour credit for each post.

Online Book Club via Zoom

We are going to have our first zoom book club at the end of the month. One thing we are not going to do is assign a book for our online book club
because we know it would be hard for members to have access to the same book since services are so limited at our libraries right now. We hope to move to having a teen picked reading theme for each month.

TAG (Teen Advisory Group)

We also planned our first district TAG meeting. We hope to get more input into what teens would like to be doing for virtual programs. We will also
give them an hour for community services. For all of our zoom events we are going to require sign up ahead of time for safety so we know who is coming. We want to avoid having an issue. For each of our virtual programs we plan to have two librarians at least so we can monitor the chat for safety.

Trivia

My Co-Worker Faith again has some great ideas. She is making a mini trivia quiz for some of our programs to use as an advertisement such as Animal Crossing and putting a link to sign up for our virtual Animal Crossing event. She is also working on special trivia events we can do as separate programs.

How to Host a Virtual Trivia Night

How to Host a Zoom Trivia Night

Virtual Talent Show

The Plainfield Library is working on doing a virtual talent show.
They are using zoom to coordinate. Teens are going to work on their talent all summer and it will come together in a virtual show at the end of the program series.

How to Host a Virtual Talent Show

Cindy Shutts, MLIS

Cindy is passionate about teen services. She loves dogs, pro-wrestling, Fairy tales, mythology, and of course reading. Her favorite books are The Hate U Give, Catching FIre, The Royals, and everything by Cindy Pon. She loves spending times with her dog Harry Winston and her niece and nephew. Cindy Shutts is the Teen Services Librarian at the White Oak Library District in IL and she’ll be joining us to talk about teen programming. You can follow her on Twitter at @cindysku.

Filed under: Teen Programming