Hello and welcome, readers! Thank you for visiting STEM in Libraries. Some of you wonderful readers stumbled upon us thanks to the recent PLA conference, some of you may have found us through various social media outlets and blogs, and others have stumbled across us by chance. However you found us, we’re glad you did!

After 50+ weeks of sharing STEM programs, we thought it might be time to introduce ourselves and offer some explanation about our blog and how it works.

Those of you who saw us at PLA know that we are called “The Heathers.” We’re two librarians from the Midwest, both called Heather, who love STEM programming. We’re scientists–library scientists! Our goal and inspiration is to make STEM programming fun and approachable for librarians everywhere. To that end, please feel free to use any and all of our programs at your library- we’ve written it all up so it can be of use to our fellow librarians and library fans. If you do one of our programs, we’d love to know how it went. You can send us an email, or drop a comment on the relevant post.

About those posts…

We do, on average, about 3 STEM programs a month: a STEAM storytime, a program for grades 1-3, and a program for grades 4-6. We’ve also been known to throw in a family program and a teen program (6th grade and up) for good measure. As soon as we get a chance, we write up the program and post it on the blog–although, as many of you know, a librarian’s life is a busy life, so we don’t exactly have a regular posting schedule!

Additionally, after 50+ original STEM programs, we are beginning to repeat our programs. Some programs we do exactly as originally planned, and others….well, we change things up! If that happens, we’ll be sure to post an update on the blog, so you can see how it went!

Now, for some nuts and bolts!

All of our programs require registration. Our 1st-3rd and 4th-6th grade programs are capped at 24 participants per session. STEAM storytimes are capped at 20 children with their caregivers. There are occasions when we may lower the 4th-6th grade participant cap to 10-16–for example, the Blinky Monsters  program, which requires a lot of hands-on help and pricier materials.

For each program, we offer an estimate price. We break the estimated price down like so:

$ 0-50

$$ 50- 100

$$$ $100+

Your mileage may vary depending on what you already have on hand in your library.

We are also exceptionally fond of organization (we are librarians, after all), so we make extensive use of both the Category and Tag feature. Looking for a Math program? Click the Math category handily located at the top of the page. Looking for a program for grades 4-6? Click the 4-6 Grade tag (and the 4-6 Grade Variation tag!).  Are we missing a way to organize things? Drop us an email and let us know!

If you are interested in sharing your own STEM programs with us and our readers, we welcome you to contact us! All we ask is that you follow our basic post structure, so that it’s easy for other librarians to try your program, too.

Have a question about our programs? Need some STEM advice? Just want to say hi? We’re really friendly, so feel free to send us a message!

Lastly, after so many STEM programs, we’re bound to have a few favorites. If you are a new reader and are wondering where to start, may we suggest the following?

Week One: DIY Rollercoasters
Week Two: Computer Programming Unplugged
Week Fifteen: Let’s be Paleontologists!
Week Nineteen: STEAM Storytime: Outer Space!
Week Twenty: Catapults
Week Thirty-Two: Lego Architecture and Ratios

Thank you again for reading and sharing with us. Now, let’s all have fun with STEM! Yay!

-The Heathers

P.S. We’d like to invite you to check out the other STEM in libraries- http://www.starnetlibraries.org/stem.html -put together by the amazing STAR_Net: Science-Technology Activities & Resources for Libraries. They are one of our favorite resources and our blog names are similar, too!