Ocean Trivia Double Dare

This past summer's theme was water, and every year we like to do a trivia game with our tweens. This year was no exception, but to up the ante we decided to bring back an old school game show - Double Dare. Though we didn't have an OCD Marc Summers to host, we weren't deterred and came up with a diabolical game to delight and thrill ourselves (who cares if the kids had fun).

The tweens were split up into two teams. We randomly chose which team went first and began our game. Team A got the first chance to answer the question. If they answered it right, they got full points, if they answered it wrong, they got nothing and Team B had a chance to steal. However, if Team A wasn't sure, they could always dare Team B to answer the question. Team B would then have the chance to answer (for less points) or double dare Team A. Team A could then try to answer (for even less points now) or take the physical challenge.

There were two physical challenges they could choose from - an activity or eating a gross food. If they chose gross food, they got more points. Gross foods included nori (sushi seaweed), wakame (seaweed salad), canned clams, clam juice, a goldfish (the cracker - though we didn't tell them that unless they picked it), shots of cold clam chowder, anchovies - I think you get the idea. They had to eat the whole thing (and not puke) to get full points. Activity challenges included searching blindfolded through a bowl of Jello for the shark fruit snacks, playing a round of Charades, hopping around the room on one leg singing the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, etc.

Teams A & B would take turns having first crack at questions until the game was over.  The tweens had a great time - and really?  I don't think anyone was *too* grossed out by the food.  In fact - some of them were asking for more when we were done.  Guess I'll have to get my Schadenfreude somewhere else.

Slight Format Change

Wow!  I can't believe how much of a slacker I've been.  Not updating this site in 4 YEARS?! Sheesh!  It's not that I haven't done any cool teen programs - I have!  They just haven't been as prolific.  As such, this blog is going to change to reflect that.  We will now be featuring ideas for our preschool story times (as much for our own memories' sake as for your benefit).  For those of you that found this blog - my apologies for not doing better, and I hope you enjoy the upcoming changes!

Hunger Games RPG

Well I promised a post about our RPG, so here it is. If any of you aren't already into gaming here's a good tip: find a geeky friend to help you. I LARP and play RPGS, but I was a bit over my head when it came to initial planning of the whole thing. Thankfully, I had my trusted friend Josh to help me out.

While I was waiting for him to come help me with getting character sheets and explaining how to be an ST (storyteller or GM, if you prefer Game Master - since that's what they were called in the books), I took it upon myself to map out my arena and get an idea of what weapons I wanted available to my players. If I had graph paper, I would've used it - instead, I measured and drew the grid. In my head, each square was 1/4 mile, but I don't think that was realistic enough. It probably would've only been 100 ft or so. *shrugs* The great thing about being GM is that if you find things that aren't working, you can spontaneously change them.

The first map is the one that only I could see.
 I mapped out the terrain and any predators, traps, and poisonous animals/plants that I wanted them to run into. This is also the map I used to keep track of where they all were.
In a normal RPG game, all the players are working together - so it doesn't matter if they know where each other are on the map. In this game, since the players were all against each other, I had to come up with a way to keep them from knowing that, hence the second map. See - if this game was "real life", the characters would have NO IDEA where the other people were. For them to look on a map and see would have given them an unfair way to find each other. The second map was totally blank. I don't even know why I gave it to them, except that so they could keep track of where they were in their heads. Pretty much, I showed them where they were to start out, and then when they wanted to move they would tell me "x # of spaces in X direction" (i.e. 3 squares north or 2 squares southwest). I drew a little dot in each space they moved, so I had a little line to help me keep track of things.

I found a list of weapons on a DnD website, and used a lot of those. Things like a spear, a trident, throwing knives, and a bow and a quiver of arrows are all good weapons. Things like firearms are not, as they were not used in the books. Things like +1 damage mean the player gets to roll an additional dice to see if they hit someone.

It's interesting. I ran this game with two very different groups of kids. My teens at the Main library had all read the books, so they were very cautious and strategic about EVERYTHING. My teens at FW hadn't read any of the books, so they dove head-on and even attacked each other during the first game! Awesome! As much as the game is cool because it brings the story to life for the kids, I actually preferred playing with the kids who hadn't read the books yet. Hopefully, playing this game will spur them to do so. I'm thinking about doing an event close to the time of the movie opening in March. I want to get some archery stations set up and show the kids how to do things like camouflage paint and rope-tying - you know, survival skills.

Halloween Crafts

Originally, I had planned on doing this cool glowing necklace for a craft with my teens, but when it came down to the wire, I had forgotten to order the mini 1.5" glowsticks that I needed, and thus ended up having to come up with something to do at the last minute. Here is where I have to confess: I love Martha Stewart. Well, not necessarily her, but all the people that work for her and come up with all the cute ideas in her website/magazine/tv show. Going to her website and browsing around a little totally saved my butt - especially when I found the

fanged pumpkins.

Walmart had these bags of mini pumpkins  - 3 for $3, so I snapped a few of those up.  The pumpkins were a pretty decent size - about 7 inches or so in diameter and about 4 inches tall.  All you have to do is use the template from Martha Stewart to cut out a mouth and then use that opening to thoroughly scrape out the pumpkin.  (The better you can get it scraped out, the longer it will last.  I think I had mine sitting on my computer til at least Thanksgiving.)  Pop in a set of plastic vampire teeth, use some pins for eyes and voila!  A really cute pumpkin that's super-easy.  The ones I did lasted on my desk for quite awhile too.  If I can find it, I'll post the after picture.  It's pretty funny.

The other craft I did was inspired by Martha Stewart, but not taken directly from there. The website had instructions on making a ghost necklace by allowing a blob of glue to dry and then punching a hole in it. At a horror con awhile back, I had seen someone selling latex jewelry and I thought - why not merge the two? So using food coloring, I mixed up a bottle of dark purple and red dye apiece. Using wax paper, I drew out my design for a bracelet. (An easy way to fasten it is to

 draw a loop on one end and an arrow on the other. Pull the arrow through the hole, and the wings of the arrows catch, holding it closed)

From what I remember the teens liked this, but maybe had a little trouble with the bracelets.  Understandable.  Maybe try it with Tacky glue?  The food coloring will thin it some, and you can thin it with a little water if you need to, but maybe if it doesn't run as much, they'll have an easier time.

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...**