The Hunger Games

If you work for a library, and you don't know what The Hunger Games is, then you are stuck in some sort of time wormhole where it's permanently 2004 (or something). It's a fantastic series written by Suzanne Collins and you really need to check it out. I had heard about it and intended to read it, but didn't get off my butt and do it until a bunch of my adult friends got swept up in the stories.

Now, as a little back story, let me tell you that I am a HUGE geek/nerd. I'm part of a stage-combat group that does the living chessboard at the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire every year. I LOVE Doctor Who and Being Human (esp. the British version). The nerdiest thing of all is that I LARP - that's live action role-playing. If you're really old-school, it's a modified version of Dungeons and Dragons, but without the dice. That's what I do every Friday night (I know, you're jealous).

Now that you know all that, I can tell you that when I read The Hunger Games, I got inspired. What book would make a better RPG than that? For those of you totally unfamiliar with the premise of the book, America has fallen and a new country, Panem, has taken its place. The country is divided into 12 Districts and the Capitol. The distribution of goods is a bit uneven, so some districts are starving, while people in the Capitol drink liquids that make them vomit just so they can eat more at the fancy parties they go to. A long time ago, the districts tried to revolt against the Capitol and lost. As a punishment, every year they have something called The Hunger Games. 2 tributes are sent from each district to fight in an arena battle to the death. The last person standing wins. If they win, their district gets food for a year (the other reason it is called The Hunger Games is that kids can put their names in more times to be drawn in order to get food for their family).

It's pretty messed up and violent (making it one of the top 10 most challenged books of 2009-2010), but at the same time, I figured it would be something the kids would really get into. It will definitely make for a battle-heavy RPG, but I'm still confident the kids will enjoy it. We're using basic character sheets from World of Darkness, and I'm trying to make the dice-rolling as simple as possible. I will put up another post detailing more of my pre-planning as soon as I have it all figured out.

We're not starting this til November, but I have put up signs and posted a sign-up sheet to try to generate some early interest. I'm doing a scavenger hunt for Banned Books Week and decided today to give away a copy of the book to the winner. Not that anyone really reads this, but in case you do - check out your local Walmart this week! When I went to pick up copies of The Hunger Games (which were only $6.25/each), I noticed they had a lot of the banned books for sale i.e. 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, etc.

Collaged Notebooks

As it was back-to-school time when my programs started off, I decided to kick off my teen programs with a collaged notebook. It was after the major sales, but Office Max still had some crazy sales going on, and I was able to nab several packs of notebooks (3/pack - only $2)!

This is a really easy craft to do, of course, and it requires very little work on your part! All I do is give them the notebooks, paintbrushes, glue, magazines, and scissors and let them go to town. Note: this may need to be a two-parter b/ it takes a long time to pick and cut out the pictures you want. The kids may have to leave the notebooks behind so they can dry.

For those of you not familiar with collaging, the process is simple. Once you have your pictures cut out, take a small amount of water and add it to some regular, white glue. Paint the glue solution onto the area you want you pic, lay

the picture down, and then do another coat of glue on top of it (this helps seal it in). You can buy official Mod-podge at craft stores, but the glue and water works just as well. The only difficulty I had this go-round was that the glue/water solution wanted to bead up - which is an issue I've never had before. I just kept running my brush over it to spread it out, and eventually it dried alright. If you look at my notebook really closely, you can see where the glue is. I also had a problem with my paper wanting to wrinkle up, but again, I just kept smoothing it out with my brush, and didn't seem to turn out too badly.

The kids really liked it, but they ran out of time. Most of them got their notebooks done, they just had to leave them here to dry.

Banned Books Week

Sometimes these special themed weeks really throw me for a loop, and sometimes they can be really inspiring. This year is the first year I'm really celebrating Banned Books Week with my teens, and I've decided to do a scavenger hunt.

I've done scavenger hunts in the past with my teens. The first one I did, found here, was basically trying to get them familiar with the library (there's a question for each section of books) and how to look for things in some of the books. Mine is just to give you an idea of some things you can do because of course you won't have the same displays or books that my library has. It was a bit difficult, and most of the teens didn't finish. I gave them about 45 minutes to do 25 questions (some of which, I'll admit, were hard), so I decided that for this go-round I need to scale it back a bit. *One cool thing we did though - I had a sheet with the answers printed on it and gave it out to the teens, so they could write a story with the answers. The best story won an iPod Shuffle.*

If you go to the American Library Association's website, you can find lists of banned books listed by author, by decade - and that's what I used to write my scavenger hunt. You can find mine here. Again, you may not have the same books - or even the same editions that I have, so you may have to change some of the questions to suit your library. This is just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. I haven't done this with my teens yet, but I'm hoping they will have an easier time with this one.

**Update** Did the scavenger hunt yesterday. I had a hard time getting them to scatter and work separately, and they did have a hard time with this one too. They kept complaining that they didn't know where things were, and I told them that this was supposed to teach them how to do that. Before we started, I asked if they knew how to use our catalog computers and they all said yes, so I ley them go - turns out they didn't know as much as they thought (go figure, right?). Afterwards, when I was giving out prizes and telling them about The Hunger Games and the upcoming RPG, they got really excited (yay!). I think I should've told them about that ahead of time to give them that competitive spirit...**