ATLAS: Egg Dyeing Party for Tweens

I got the idea for this program when I saw that another library was going to do egg decorating with their teens. I have learned to follow the general rule that what works with teens will be popular with tweens too, therefore dyeing eggs was put on the agenda for this month's At The Library After School.

Because I didn't think egg dyeing would take up the whole hour I had allotted for programming, I decided to include some games as well. I found several games on about.com that I thought the tweens would enjoy.

We started with egg bowling. I had some chocolate bunnies on hand, so our goal was simply to roll a plastic egg closest to the chocolate bunny. The winner of each round got to keep the bunny. This worked out to be a great opening activity, because the kids that walked in late could join the game the next round.

After egg bowling, we played "Steal the Egg".  The basic premise of the game is that the kids were divided into numbered pairs. When their number is called, both must try to get the egg placed on the floor in the center of the room. The kids had a good time playing this game, and I liked that it fulfilled my goal of including active games in my programs.

Finally, we moved on to egg dyeing. I had bought an egg dye kit for each group of 4 kids and prepared the dye before hand. I made sure to have paper towel available. Our larger programming room has no sink, so this was a must. I also had coloring pages and a wordsearch available for them to do while they waited for eggs to soak. To take eggs home I provided empty egg cartons donated by our staff.

Here are a few pictures of the finished product:

Overall I think this program went well. It actually ended up being less messy than I thought it would be! I am definitely planning on doing it again next year.

At next month's ATLAS we will be playing a variety of playground games in honor of National Backyard Game Week. I look forward to letting you all know how it goes :)