I'll miss seeing you this week - but check out these digital escape rooms! See if you can solve the riddles, puzzles and more, and escape! Here are a few you can try:
Let me know which one is the best or which one you did! See you next Wednesday!
I've toyed with the idea of doing a murder mystery-esque activity for my teens in the library for a while, but wasn't quite sure how to put it all together. After reading lots of blog posts and trolling Pinterest for a not insignificant amount of time, I decided to make the mystery more like a scavenger hunt. I looked at several different examples and tweaked them all to fit my teen group and my library. I started out by telling the teens about the murder, the suspects, the weapons, and the different possible locations. I thought about having my coworkers be the suspects, but decided against it for various reasons (only one of which being I didn't think I could get anyone to lay on the floor next to a pool of fake blood to take a picture).
The victim is Vincent R. Boddy, the library director of Sunny Days, Shady Nights Public Library. He's worked in the library for 20 years. His knowledge of books is encyclopedic and his pension could put a graphic novel in the hands of every teen in the district. While not always the best boss, Vincent did what he could to make the staff like each other. His recent bout with swine flu nearly had him convinced to retire, but someone decided that he should clock out early.
Suspects
The Weapons
Possible Scenes of the Crime
After this, I divided the teens into teams (there were enough clues for three teams, but we only needed two): boys vs. girls. I gave them each their first clue and told them to get to it.
Logjam at the card catalog!
So each of the clues, aside from the first, had two components - the first was the location part of the clue and the second was a clue to the murder mystery. For example, the first clue said, "When Elise was little, her favorite book was a Dr. Seuss book, but it wasn't Green Eggs and Ham or One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Her favorite character has a hat and hates fish, especially gold fish." The answer to that clue is where the next one is hidden. So when they found The Cat in the Hat, they found their first murder mystery clue (The weapon is made of metal) and their next location clue ("James's favorite book is by James Patterson. It shares its title with this well-known rhyme: Roses are red, _______ ___ ____, Sugar is sweet, and so are you.")
I was worried that: 1. the kids would hate it and think it was corny 2. it would be too hard 3. it would be too easy 4. I wouldn't be able to finish all of it in time for them. WRONG ON ALL COUNTS! It took just about the right amount of time - 35 minutes. Everyone had to ask for help at least once. They said they had a really good time and the whole thing took me around four hours to work up total. Not bad. The most time consuming aspects were writing the clues and then hiding them properly before the event. Since we did finish with extra time, we spent the rest of our allotted hour playing Mafia (which next to Apples to Apples and snacking is my teens' favorite thing to do).
The link below is a link to the Google Doc with all of my narrative and clues. Obviously, this probably won't work exactly perfect for you unless you happen to have all of the same books we do, a little girl reading statue, and two randomly placed American Flags, but the clues will definitely give you an idea of how I put this all together and you can tweak it to fit your library program.
Soooo when I decided that my young writer’s group was going to become a teen advisory board in late spring, I decided to do some different activities for them in the summer. I came up with a pretty substantial list of things for them to do, but they insisted that we have some sort of food related activity. NOTE: They are always eating. The fact that they wanted to do something with food was no surprise. So I put The Ultimate Food Fight as our activity for the fourth week of summer reading, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it for a week or two. I did a little brainstorming and came up with this. I will say that this has been my most successful program as far as the teens being completely satisfied with the activity.
So the hour was different food-related Minute to Win It type games followed by a pie fight of epic proportions.
1st game: Move an Oreo from your forehead to your mouth using only your face muscles. This was hilarious for me. I’ll show you.
They made the weirdest, most awkward facial movements I have ever seen. I could not stop giggling.
2nd game: Orange roll
I don’t have pictures of this one because I had to participate for even teams. We broke into two teams and had to roll an orange back and forth (relay style) between two masking tape strips. The team that finished first won. (Needless to say, my team won. Heh.)
3rd game: Pasta Pick-up
Four people had one minute to pick up the most colored noodles using only an uncooked piece of spaghetti. They thought this would be a breeze, but it took them a lot longer than they thought. Then they had fun playing with the noodles after.
4th game: M&M sort
I had two bags of M&Ms – one peanut, one regular – and they had a minute to sort the m&ms into a tray by color. Same thing here – harder than it looked. The best strategy we found was to pick out all the m&ms of one color and then go the next, rather than taking a handful and trying to sort them.
5th game: Chubby Bunny
Seriously. How could I have a food competition and NOT do chubby bunny? Here they are with all the marshmallows in their mouths.
PIE FIGHT!!!
I did this when I was in high school as part of a summer drama program. After that, I have to this DAY never knowingly eaten Redi-whip. It was fun, but sticky and smelly and gross after. I knew these guys would love it. So I bought a bunch of pie plates and cans of Redi-whip (I did not buy enough. 1 can of regular Redi-whip fills about two pie plates. Also don’t make them even fifteen minutes before you use them. Make them and use them, or the Redi-whip starts to melt). I made them go out to the grass and take all their stuff with them and brought a roll of paper towels. I did NOT want them back in the library all gross.
Totally messy. Totally happy teens. SUCCESS!
I have a teen group. I am so proud of myself for having a teen group. I also love my teen group for just rolling with whatever I have planned, even if it is kind of lame. This activity though was totally NOT lame and I want to throw a shout out to Heather Booth for the idea.
I made three city buildings out of shelving boxes for a summer reading program activity and recycled them for this program. I also pulled a bunch of different sized boxes out of our friends bookstore closet to use as other buildings. The hardest thing to wrangle for this program were the balls to make the birds. Heather managed to find three different sized balls of the appropriate color for each of her birds. I could not. I was at our Target with my husband loudly lamenting the fact that I couldn’t find any regular balls. We finally found some foam dodge balls that were perfect, just not appropriately sized.
ere are the illustrious birds along with one lone pig. I blew up all of the green balloons and left them blank so the teens could create their own pigs, which they did with glee. I set up the first level, if you will, just to get everything started.
I know, not super exciting. They knocked it all down in no time flat and then got to work setting up a new level.
This is what they eventually came up with.
I was impressed. This was definitely one of those activities that I though would run out of steam about halfway through the hour and we’d just sit around or play mafia or something, but no. They played Angry Birds the WHOLE HOUR. It was a hit. I destroyed one of their creations by running straight into it and they decided they all wanted to do that too, so I let them do that. Here’s a video of my assistant and some of the teens destroying one of their levels just so you have an idea of how it all worked.
If you are a little wary about this one, I would say as long as you have a relatively soundproof area (or don’t mind the noise) and lots of space I say GO FOR IT. We had a blast.
This contains all my library adventures in my teeny tiny library in Northern Minnesota. I will feature programming, storytime plans, book reviews, and other musings on stuff that I find interesting. Thanks for visiting!
