Summer Kids College at University of North Carolina Pembroke

Abstract

The University of North Carolina Pembroke hosts a Regional Center for Economic Development which reaches out to the community offering two sections of summer camp called Kids College and Teen College. We at the Library have sought the opportunity to contribute to the Information Literacy skills of these students, first through eleventh grades, by providing activity periods full of library action! The activities for these camps last an hour and a half, so we get one or two sections of these groups per day. We outline a program for these young students in the spring, then hold on to our hats as summer comes, because we never know exactly when or how many students will drop in to participate. It is never more than twenty, but the age range is rather large. The planning team for Kids College consists of four library staff members, who are composed of one former children’s librarian, one former teen librarian, one former teacher and another who is young at heart. We put our expertise and emotional intelligence about children to work planning fun programming that is developmentally-appropriate for a large age-range group, intellectually stimulating and hopefully exciting! The challenges are great, because there are so many varying factors: we are not sure who exactly is participating, what their interests are, when they are coming to the library, and where would be the best place for this. Luckily the kids involved are very open-minded, do not yet have any prejudice against the library and in fact are very agreeable about the entire experience. I always dread a mass uprising of middle-school children who basically refuse to do “library activities,” but in two years of doing this, that hasn’t happened! In fact they really enjoy themselves, give great feedback and provide suggestions for their eventual return. The program lasts for two weeks; during the first week of Kids College we had the theme of Dinosaurs Ate the Library! For this we prepared four different days of activities, mostly structured like this: Read a picture book, quiz the students on their knowledge and interest in dinosaurs (and the library,) then split them into pairs and show them how to find books in the catalog. This is when the students get the most excitedwhen they are out on the prowl for their DINOSAUR EGGS! After being assigned a title of a book in our juvenile collection, students walk very quickly—(no running please!) to find out which dinosaur they will be researching. An egg, with the name of a type of dinosaur, is hidden in each of the titles assigned, then World Book M E L A N I E W O O D / U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A P E M B R O K E