On Thursday afternoon, I had one of the most interesting programs I have offered this summer. It centers around Twilight, the first novel in a tremendously popular series of books by Stephenie Meyer. The story centers around Bella, a high school student who moves to Washington state to live with her father. When she gets to school, she meets a really interesting family by the name of Cullen. They are different, and before long she learns that they are actually a small group of vampires. They have sworn off feeding from people so they are good vampires, and she falls in love with one of them. The library was offering a party to celebrate the books, and it turned out to be a popular program.

Obviously we talked about the books, but we wanted to do more than have a book discussion group session on them. I wanted to add an element of fun to the program. So, we extended it to a two-hour session and threw in a lot of fun activities.

We started off by talking about how each of the participants first heard of the book and what made them want to read it. Then, we made some vampire cupcakes. What are those you ask? Basically, I spent Wednesday evening baking up some angel food cupcakes from scratch, but left them plain so the teens would be able to decorate them.

In order to decorate them, the teens just had to cut out an upside-down cone from the top and just trim off most of the cone. They filled the hole with cherry pie filling and put the cap back on. They frosted over the cupcake with frosting before taking a toothpick to pierce fang marks into the top and drizzle some cherry pie filling to make it look like they had been bittne by a vampire.

After they were done that, they had snacks to pick on during the rest of the program. I then loaded the Internet so we could view the two recently released previews for the Twilight movie coming out in December. The kids got really excited about the prospects, though they were a little worried about whether or not the movie could possibly be as good as the books.

When we finished with that, we had a trivia contest based on the books, and they all had so much fun with that. The intention had been to see who could get 10 answers right first, but it turned out to be a lot longer than that because they kept getting tied!

After that, we moved on to decorating t-shirts. I had picked up plain white t-shirts at Michael's that morning, and the kids used fabric markers to decorate them. I would love to share some of the pictures with you, but I really can't show any of the faces of the kids to you. The t-shirts were well-decorated, but also had some really witty phrases and ideas in them.

While they were decorating, I brough up a MySpace page for The Bella Cullen Project, which is alternagyrl band that performs music based on the events and characters in the books.

That was when one of the girls in the group mentioned Muse, which is a British band that provided Stephenie Meyer with the idea for both Twilight and her new alien related novel for adults called Host. She brought up the MySpace page for the band so the kids could hear those to songs.

By that time, the session was coming to a close and parents were coming to pick up the kids who could not drive and everyone left. It was a pretty successful program, and the kdis really seem to have a lot of fun.