Our library staff are available for field trips on Mondays and Fridays. We offer flexible, 90-minute skill-building literary adventures for youth aged 8-18. Student writing can be made into books, taken home, and added to the permanent library collection.

Current Field Trip Offerings:

• Poetic License: As an introduction to poetry, students will read and discuss several short, pre-decided poems from the ILYW collection: They will discuss themes, structure, tone, word choice, and metaphor. Students will then create their own poems based on prompts or themes (selected from the Poetic License field trip folder). Students will create poems individually and in groups. If desired, poems will be shared aloud and bound as an anthology to take back to school and added to the library’s permanent collection.

• Comic Book Factory:  Comics have been around since the Neolithic period as a way of telling stories through images and repetition. Comics are a bold visual method of storytelling that can attract readers regardless of language. This field trip will give students the opportunity to write, illustrate, and construct a comic through personal diary entries or their own imagination! Learn how to design characters, write plot, and tie-up a story in just three panels.

  • Diary Comics: We also offer a Diary Comics field trip! This field trip gives students the opportunity to document their daily lives through pictures, writing and personal musings. Learn to chronicle your life, you may need it for your autobiography. 

• Letter Writing: Tired of talking on the phone? Sick of boring emails? Learn the basics of snail mail with our letter-writing workshop! This workshop will give students the opportunity to write letters to whoever they can imagine. Want to reach out to your favorite author? Write a thank you note to your pet? Send a message into deep space? We can help.

• Being Zine: What’s a zine? Short for “magazine,” zines are small self-published books or pamphlets with the purpose of building community and expressing oneself. To make a zine, all you need are a pair of scissors, a piece of paper, and an idea that you would like to share! What do we care about enough to want other people to know about it too? Students will learn to fold, write, embellish and reproduce zines for distribution through demonstration and collaboration.

• Scary Stories: Taking advantage of the library’s collection of scary tales and horror, students will tap into real and imaginary fears as they create stories to read aloud around the library’s campfire loft. This field trip features public speaking and theater. Students will practice physical expression and tone of voice in the delivery of their stories! Some of the field trip’s writing prompts can be based on adapting and updating scary stories and folktales that are familiar to young people. Students can create stories individually or in groups. If desired, students can have their campfire tales bound as an anthology to take back to school and be added to the library’s permanent collection.

• Design-Your-Own-Field Trip: Taking advantage of the library’s collection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, family stories, science fiction, and more, students and teachers can design their field trips and are encouraged to follow their interests or connect to something they are already working on. The experience can focus on a particular genre or theme, and can include zine and comic making, anthologies, stories written on typewriters, and almost anything else you can imagine!

Other Experiences you don’t want to miss:

• Resting in a comfy chair and reading a good book

• Creating a story on a typewriter (clackity-clack)

• Drawing & illustrating

• Writing book recommendations

• Finding a secret room

• Daydreaming