Hello again! I am back with the promised Gingerbread Competition!
I took what I learned hosting the pumpkin carving and made some changes and we ended up with a 60 (!!!) gingerbread houses decorated this past week. Riding a sugar high over here.

This time, I advertised the program starting the Monday before. We shared a flyer in the student e-news, displayed it in the library, and ran it on the TVs around campus. I skipped advance sign-ups and instead made it clear that supplies were first come, first served, with a limit of ten houses per day. This took some logistical pressure off me.
I gathered all the supplies the week prior and built the first round of houses on Friday before the weekend. Gingerbread is a bit of a misnomer here, as the houses were built with graham crackers. I pre-built everything for two reasons: children are messy creatures, and graham cracker houses need time to set before decorating. I wanted students to spend their time creating, not waiting for walls to stop sliding apart!

Full disclosure, I have been building these houses for groups for years. I am pretty good at them. A middle schooler timed me this week, and I can assemble a house in 42 seconds! If you want a tutorial, I am always happy to share. My two biggest tips are to use Walmart brand graham crackers and the cheapest store-bought icing you can find. That icing dries like concrete.
We set the houses out on plates around a large table covered in plastic dollar store tablecloths. I offered icing in disposable piping bags in both white and green. Do not dye green icing yourself! You can buy tubs of it at the dollar store and save yourself the trouble.

For decorations, we had lots of options, but the most popular were Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, mini candy canes, mini M&Ms, pull-and-peel Twizzlers, pretzels, and of course the icing. All candy was kept in bowls on a table where I stationed myself, and students came up to select what they wanted rather than having free access at the decorating tables. This encouraged more intentional choices and allowed us to gently remind them not to eat the candy, given how many hands had been in those bowls.

They still ate the candy. I did what I could!
Monday was slow, and I once again had to remind myself that the beginning of a program is not a measure of its success. Students do not read emails, and word of mouth takes time. I recruited a few of my frequent library visitors to decorate that first day, and later that evening an entire basketball team came in for study hall and enthusiastically built houses they were genuinely proud of. After that, the floodgates opened. Students streamed in all week asking about the gingerbread houses!
This time, we posted the ribbon categories ahead of time, and several students decorated very intentionally with winning in mind. I recruited our Head of School to award a ribbon as well this time, and the kids thought that was particularly exciting. They checked back regularly to see when prizes would be awarded, and the students who earned ribbons were incredibly proud. As they should have been!

Watching this program unfold was such a joy, and I cannot thank the Vision to Reality Grant team enough for funding this kind of library fun. I will be back in February with another program and, if all goes according to plan, another full library!