Around November and December of each year, I start getting excited about the holiday season. There’s something about the crisp air, lights and vivid greens against the otherwise gray world, and the anticipated time with family. I love the feeling. But I know not everyone celebrates the same way I do, so I try to have secular options to celebrate the season. One of the options we did this year, was a building challenge with graham crackers!
Our goals for the program were that children (especially tweens) would:
- Strengthen their STEAM skills, engage in a cognitively challenging task, and build vocabulary while having fun.
- Socialize and build relationships within their community as they interact in the challenge.
To achieve those goals, my coworker, K, and I prepared an open-ended building challenge to allow participants to have fun, be creative, engage in a STEAM-related task, and introduced the engineering design process.
Ok, so gingerbread would’ve been preferable, but graham crackers proved to be just as fun (and tasty)! We put a simple challenge to the test for the kids. Can you create a graham cracker structure? We asked them to fill out a quick worksheet to “plan” their structure. The worksheet also had areas that they could fill out after they had made the structure to determine what worked best or how they could try to fix something that didn’t work. We provided graham crackers, frosting, gummy glue (melted down gummy bears), candies such as M&M’s, candy corn, sprinkles, skittles, peppermints, pull and peel Twizzlers, etc.
We set up the program as a 2.5 hour drop-in, so that patrons could come whenever they wanted and stay for as long as they liked. We had about 77 patrons take part in the program, many of them tweens, but also quite a few preschoolers. Everyone was certainly happy and hyped up on sugar!
*NOTE: Thanks again to my library’s marketing team for taking photos during this program!
Librarian Ginny 