Down on the Farm Party for Woolbur

One of the events my library hosts every fall is a celebration party in honor of that year's Michigan Reads* book selection. This year's honoree is Woolbur by Leslie Helakoski, so we threw a Down on the Farm station-based party. This party was staffed by 3 people (1 at the cakewalk, 1 at the bean bag toss, and another helping with crafts) and attended by 41 people. Pretty much everything we did was inspired by this awesome birthday party, to give credit where credit's due. So enjoy some pretty pictures without much blathering on! Our stations were: petting zoo (with puppets), water table fishing pond with rubber ducks, cake walk with farm animals, and bean bag toss.

Die for Woolbur's Walk

As far as the cake walk goes, it was "cake-less". Instead we called the game "Woolbur's Walk." We gave the winners a small toy instead of a cake. I printed out clip art pic

Woolbur's Walk

tures of 6 different farm animals and taped them to these spots we have in storage (given to us graciously by one of our other branches who was cleaning out their storage). I put the same pictures into the 6 spots on the changeable die that I have also used for Roll a Rhyme. When I stopped the music, whichever kid(s) was on the animal whose

picture rolled up was a winner. This allowed us to have more winners than drawing a number out of a hat and the animals tied in with the farm theme. A mom said she was going to steal this idea for her child's birthday party next month!

Fishing Pond (water table was mine, other pieces borrowed from another branch)

We put our farm animal puppets (plus a dinosaur because why not?), a selection of farm-themed pop-up books, and my daughter's plastic tractor to create a puppet petting zoo. One of my staff members had the genius idea to use bulletin board paper as the background and she taped down the blanket on the floor for boundary marking/comfort.