Teen nights hosted by Natrona County Public Library offer an hour of socialization and creativity for Casper teens each week. The weekly event is Thursdays from 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. for teens in 7th- 12th grade. Each week is a different activity, with rotations of coloring, games, crafts, and movies. These events are supervised and planned by the library’s teen section staff Chelsie Troutman and Lorene Peterson.

“We try to break it up so we have a game night, where we do different board games once a month. We also do a coloring club once a month, and then we do an arts and crafts program usually in the Crawford room and then we do a creation station program where we utilize the cricket or the glow forge machine,” Troutman said.

The library has weekly events, but they also have special events geared towards teens throughout the year. “We do lots of movie nights so over spring break we’ll do movie days and we’ll do all day movie marathons. We’ll order pizza and have snacks. We celebrate Harry Potter’s birthday in the summer. It’s a lot of fun,” Troutman said.

These events offer an opportunity for teens to meet and make friends. “It’s a chance to interact with people I wouldn’t usually talk to outside of those areas and I really like to get to know people in the program,” said Hazel Neubauer, a teen who has been attending the events for a year.

The library also has two different teen book clubs that meet once a month. “I also love book clubs because we meet at Metro and the Friends of the Library will purchase a drink and we just have a really good group that does both our middle school book club and our teen book club,” said Troutman.  The book clubs have books that are specifically chosen by the librarians for the age range, and interests of the members of the club. The library staff is aware of busy schedules and tries to select shorter books during the busier times of the year.

The goal of the teen programs is to bring young people into the library and allow them to learn new things. “Just providing a place for teens to hang out we provide all of the supplies. Trying to bring teens into the library and finding a common ground and having a place to hang out,” Troutman said.

These events are open to any one in 7th-12th grade who would like to attend. To see the library’s full schedule of events go to https://www.natronacountylibrary.org/.