Last night, I hosted my first BIG teen event – a Teen Chocolate Party. I had 27 teenagers come to this party!!!!! It was so much fun and was a total success. I have to thank Gretchen Ipock, a YA Librarian at the Upper Darby library for her suggestions, materials, and ideas as well as a number of ideas that I got from other online and print resources about YA services. 27 is a huge number for a teen program. I was just in meetings last week where we discussed that if you can get between 10-15 teens at a program, that is a successful program. I have to thank one of our faithful teens for posting the event on her Facebook page and inviting her friends to come – it worked! We also had some new faces who had seen our publicity elsewhere. We’ve definitely ramped up our publicity for this age group.
Activities for the party included: Chocolate trivia, M&M Bingo, Oven Mitt challenge (unwrap Hersheys kisses with oven mitts), chocolate taste-testing, candy bar guessing, contests for building towers with toothpicks and marshmallows, and more. Prizes were awarded – mostly in the form of chocolate and books 
Quote of the night from 11th grader Carson, “I admit, I was a little skeptical about coming to the Library for something like this…but I’m coming back! This was fun!” and then he offered to vaccuum for me!
Success!
