Teen Program: Anti-Valentine's Day Party

The teens at my library have a tradition of holding an Anti-Valentine's Day party every year. As this was my first February with them, I had to ask the teens and scour the previous librarian's files to see if I could find out what exactly they'd done in the past at these events. I have discovered that I generally plan about twice as many things as we have time to do, so for this program I intentionally simplified things, which ended up working out really well.

Snacks: Traditionally, the teens have eaten "stinky" snacks, things that would make one's breath smell bad. I brought in shrimp-flavored chips (available at many Asian markets) and Fritos along with onion dip to fill in that category. I like to serve something sweet, too, and the teens LOVE candy, so we had gummy worms (leftover from another program) and these poop emoji fudge things, which were almost as much fun to make as it was to watch the teens eat them. We also had oranges, as one of my teens has specifically requested that we have fruit or a similar healthy item available, which I think is a fantastic idea.

Activities: I had a ton of ideas for activities, but I settled on two: one game and one craft. For the game, we played "heartbreaker," which is where each teen inflates a red balloon and attaches it to their ankle with a length of yarn. The teens then run around the room attempting to pop everyone else's balloon while protecting their own. The teens really enjoyed this particular game, both because of the competition and because popping balloons is, apparently, hilarious. I liked this game because the rules are simple and there wasn't anything to purchase in advance; the library already had balloons and yarn available.

Our second activity was stuffed animal taxidermy. I bought a bunch of plush animals at the dollar store: bears, gorillas, bugs (I think they were "love bugs"), puppies, etc. The teens cut off the heads and hot glued them to some wooden plaques we already had. This then degenerated (as I expected) into making franken-toys. The teens took the leftover bits and used our sewing supplies to make new creatures out of the leftovers. The creepiest one by far was wearing what the teen called "the skin of its enemies;" i.e., the leftover unstuffed body of another stuffed animal.

The teens had a good time, the clean up wasn't too difficult, and overall I would consider this program to be a success. If I were to do it again, I would probably eliminate the onion dip (since no one ate it) and make sure there were extra plushies and sewing supplies out, since the teens enjoyed creating their franken-animals.