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...**