In the summertime, Princeton Public Library offers volunteer opportunities for teens with library cards. Our teen summer volunteers have traditionally been kept busy registering summer reading program participants, who range in age from zero to high school seniors, logging their reading hours and handing out the appropriate prizes for the different milestones reached. This year, we provided a unique opportunity for our volunteers called the Teen Summer Event Team.
Teen Summer Event Team volunteers spent a total of fifteen hours at the library in the span of a week. Their mission: brainstorming, planning and implementing a program for children. This summer, we had two special programs brought to us by the Teen Summer Event Team.
The first special event that we offered through the Teen Summer Event Team was our Mad Hatter Party, where teens created fun activities based on Lewis Carroll’s favorite, Alice in Wonderland. Inventive and crafty teens devised a flamingo croquet game, a make your own hat station, a tea party station and a very large birthday cake to sign and write messages to Alice, since it was indeed the 150th anniversary of this classic tale.
The second special event that we offered for children through our teen volunteers was the Hero Fair. In this program kids were able to participate in six activities created by the teens including creating your own paper bag hero puppet, a photo booth that gave the illusion of flying in the sky, and a reading station to read different books about heroes.
Combined, these programs were enjoyed by hundreds of children and their families. The real payoff for our teens, who helped create these programs, was the very valuable life skills acquired from joining this unique volunteer opportunity.