Dog Man Afternoon!

Dog Man. Is it every on your shelves for more than 5 seconds? Let’s capitalize on the popularity! After reading this fabulous guest post make sure to check out Kim’s excellent guide on how to Host a Supa Awesome Dog Man Party and Karissa’s Dog Man Library Program.

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Thomas Shalin, the Youth Services Coordinator at the Bartow County Public Library System in Cartersville, Georgia. I met Thomas on Instagram and convinved him to write about his supa awesome Dog Man Party because I’m hosting one in September and am looking for new ideas. Check out all the cool things they did!

We ended our summer school-age programs with a super afternoon, dedicated to everyone’s favorite canine, or part canine crime-fighter, Dog Man! 

When doing programs for primarily elementary aged-kids, I’m a big fan of including Reader’s Theater or some sort of play or drama activity into the program.  Kids love being a part of the story and Reader’s Theatre is excellent for sharpening their literacy skills!  For this program, we ended up reading and acting out almost the entire first Dog Man book.  I began by projecting and telling the origin story up on the screen by scrolling through the comic panels. Then, we told the tale of the Dog Man vs. the giant vacuum cleaner and the Weenie Revolution, complete with headband hats.  I put together scripts for the two chapters and gave Dog Man a few things to say since his emotion is only visually covered in the comic panels.  We had some super readers!  We always have super readers.  However,  the ringleader of the hot dogs really takes some panache, and our reader of that part for the day really helped make the story.  The kids had a blast and the crowd added the perfect sound effects.   I don’t have any pictures of us acting out the story because I was the narrator.   Here’s a picture of some of the hats and props from our storytime production!

We had four different craft/activity stations:

• A Dog Man Hat/Ears Headband – Just like the one the kids who were in the play wore
• A Petey puppet – His arms and legs were attached with brads and swung, danced, back and forth when you moved hi back and forth.
• A flip-o-rama section, with pages from Dav Pilkey’s website
• A K-9 Sniff Test Game with 6 different scents.  Since Dog Man is a police officer, we wanted to test something that every Police dog uses, their sense of smell!

There are a couple of ways you could do this. One, if you had someone watching the station, you could blindfold each child and have them sniff and guess.  Since we had drop-in stations, we punched holes in the top of each jar/container.  We used cinnamon, ground coffee, parmesan cheese, salt and vinegar chips and lemon slices.  We didn’t want to make it too hard and also wanted to put things in there that they might already be familiar with. The majority of the kids got all of them right, although the chips were kind of a curveball.  They could smell the vinegar, but the potato chip part wasn’t as obvious.

We gave away three Dog Man books as door prizes as well to three different kids.

We had about 40 kids at the program.   It was our last storytime of the summer.  We could have handled more, but 40 was a perfect amount!

Thomas Shalin is the Youth Services Coordinator at the Bartow County Public Library System in Cartersville, Georgia.  He loves his job and doing fun programs at the library and doing school visits.  He loves picture books most of all.  Here he is meeting one of his literary heroes, Dog Man.  If you have any questions about this program or about anything else you’d like to ask or talk about, he can be reached at thomas@bartowlibrary.org