Star Wars Program

A Star Wars party is a great way to get boys into your library.  It is almost like Halloween as a significant portion of the kids (and adults) will come dressed in their best Star Wars gear.

The first thing that you should do if you are going to host a party is to contact the 501st Garrison to request an appearance at least 2-3 months before your event.  If you can get them, they are great.  While it didn't work out for them to come to our party, they have come to other locations in the past.

We ran 6 different stations in our meeting room.

Station 1
This was the most popular station.  Kids made their own light sabers out of posterboard, paper towel tubes, and supplies that we had out.  We followed the pattern on Disney Family except that we cut our pieces of posterboard in half.  This makes it easier for the kids to roll the posterboard into the light saber.  If you make these, you will want to go heavier on the red and green posterboard as those were the most popular colors.  Almost all of the yellow pieces were left to the last crafters.

Station 2
Here we made Yoda stick puppets.  We started with the idea on StarWars.com, but changed it around a bit to make it easier for kids to do in a short period.  We cut the body of Yoda out of cardstock so kids could glue the felt to the cardstock pattern.  The cardstock pattern was taped to a small popsicle stick.  All of the pieces were cut out ahead of time by one of our wonderful volunteers and were sorted into snack-sized baggies that we could pass out to the kids.  That way all of the supplies were in one bag for each kid.

Station 3
To make light saber keychains, you will need 1 pipe cleaner, one neon drinking straw, 1 lanyard keychain, 3 pony beads, and a Star Wars picture.  Fold the pipe cleaner in half through the keychain (you will want the keychain in the middle of the pipe cleaner).  Add the 3 pony beads over both halves of the pipe cleaner.  Then, add the straw piece (you will need to cut it down).  I twisted the ends of the pipe cleaner together so there weren't any pokey pieces sticking out.

Station 4
I found a Darth Vader that kids could fold on http://toy-a-day.blogspot.com, but the pattern is no longer available.

Stations 5 & 6
These 2 stations were our calmer stations.  We had a Yoda coloring sheet at one and a Star Wars word search at the other.

If I were doing this again, I would either stagger registration times or run multiple smaller parties.  We have also talked about running a Jedi Academy, where kids could still make the light saber, then go through a Jedi obstacle course.  We registered 30 6-12 year olds for our program in a meeting room that can hold 100 people.  It was too many in this format as many brought younger siblings and the parents had the siblings making the crafts too.  The other problem we encountered is that we made light sabers.  These are really cool and were the highlight of the program, but there was a lot of fake fighting afterwards.