Starting a Makerspace in the Library

I have been using centers in the library for several years now and absolutely love them. They work really well at giving students choices of activities to do after the lesson and checking out new books. Now that I have 50-minute library classes as part of the Special's rotation, this has proven to be beneficial. If you haven't started centers in your own library and you're interested in starting, you can read about my journey here.
Over the last year, though, I have begun to read more and more about Makerspaces. They intrigued me, and it seemed like a natural progression from what I had been doing with my library centers. So, like most things, I decided to dive head first into trying them in my library this year.
I started off researching ideas from another amazing librarian in my district, Tracey Rice. She has been the brave pioneer that tried Makerspaces in her library already and created this great Symbaloo of ideas and resources.

After investigating these links and listening to Tracey talk about what she was doing, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what a Makerspace could be. Now, I wanted to get some feedback from my students. The first thing I did was create a chart paper that I divided into 2 columns:

• What is a Makerspace?
• What are our Expectations?

I then asked each 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade class to brainstorm their thoughts as I wrote them down. With each new class, I would let them brainstorm first, and then would share what the other classes said for them to comment on. I put check marks by ideas they liked, which would show me some similarities between grade levels and classes. I also made note of specific items they wanted to have in our Makerspace such as: Legos, Rainbow Looms, jewelry, crochet or knitting, origami, electronics, puzzles, games, arts-n-crafts, etc.

I combined all their thoughts and created this poster to hang up in our Makerspace area. (For those that know me well, I took both of them to Office Depot and had them make an 18x24 color poster.)

I also created a blank version of each so that I could use the same format in the following years.

The next thing I did was look for things to put in the Makerspace area. I started out by going into my garage and looking through all my stored teacher stuff. (One of these days I will take the time to finish going through 15 years of teaching stuff again. I've done it twice already, and each time I weeded out a lot or sold/donated things, but those that have taught for years like me know that this is a hard process to go through!)
I did find some cool things though. I had these cube puzzles that I had used with my third graders that I originally bought from Oriental Trading. I haven't been able to find anything like them there now, but I did find this site called "Happy Cube Puzzles". They are pretty pricey, but the kids LOVE THEM! And it fit perfectly for those students who wanted "puzzles and challenges" in the Makerspace! I also found my legos that I got for free when I attended a lego robotics workshop at the University of Texas (Go Longhorns!), along with an assortment of games and arts-n-crafts that I hadn't brought up to the library yet.
I'm also very lucky to have a supportive husband, and as part of his "Blue Santa" tradition, we took his 2 nieces to go shopping at Target for some toys to donate. He gave each niece a $100 bill and told them that it could be used to buy whatever toys they thought kids would like. (I still swoon when I remember him taking me on a mystery trip when we were dating!) While they shopped for items to give to Blue Santa, I shopped for some items to donate to my school from their Makerspace wish list. Here's a list of what I found at Target:

• Jewelry kit
• Super Spirograph (ahh...brought back memories!)
• Pop Up cards starter kit
• Snap Circuit starter kit
• Gravity Maze (this cool puzzle game)
• Marble Run (always a big hit)
• a variety of card games that were on sale for only $1 each

If you don't want to go out and buy a lot of stuff, there's a lot of fun activities out there that only require materials that you would have around already. You can see some great STEM activities here by Smart-Chick. I've downloaded some of her projects, and the kids LOVE them. One of their favorites is the Plastic Cup Tower! My "make your own bookmark" area is also a big hit, and you can find a ton of fun ideas on Pinterest.
Because I'm such an organization freak, I knew I would have to have some sort of system to store all these activities. I didn't think I would want to have everything out all the time, plus as new things were donated or materials were used up, I knew I was going to need a way to rotate and store the activities. I created these labels to put on my plastic containers that I already had in abundance from teaching for so long. The labels are roughly 4 inches long by 3 inches high, which easily fits onto any plastic shoe box container (like the ones you can find here at Walmart), and would allow me to easily see what was inside.

The last thing I made was an "open" and "closed" sign. I knew that some of lessons would not leave enough time for Makerspace, and I wanted to have a way to communicate this to the students (without having to say it 100 times!)

I'm planning on introducing our Makerspace area to Kinder and 1st grade soon. So far, it's been a huge hit, and the students have been doing an amazing job of following the expectations and monitoring each other. If you would like to get any of these activities, you can find them here at my TpT store or at Teacher's Notebook.
Have you tried starting a Makerspace in your library? I'd love to hear the types of activities you are doing!