Tag Archives: Programming

Book Club Starter Activities

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As librarians, we all have things at which we excel, and things that make others say, “Well, bless their heart, they tried!” For me, my kryptonite is book clubs. Over the decades I’ve been a school librarian, I’ve run many book clubs in many formats, with only intermittent success. What I’ve finally settled on, though, is a monthly, no-commitment lunchtime session, in which students who love reading can talk about books while they eat their lunches. We also eat cookies, trade recommendations, and I pass around a box of sixty-plus questions for when the discussion lags.

We always start our meetings with a brief, brain-warm-up activity that I’ve either devised or borrowed. Most of the time, students have to solve a puzzle of some kind to “earn” the cookies I bring to club, but sometimes we play a game or do a craft instead. Below is a list of as many of my activities as I can remember—please feel free to try them out!

Crafts

Crafts that don’t require a lot of prep or a lot of time to complete are best for book club openers. I advise against anything that needs glue!

  • Author’s Crafts—If you are reading a specific book, sometimes you can find activities on the author’s website, such as Keeper of the Lost cities “stickers” we turned into buttons.
  • Coloring Pages—Find coloring pages related to the book you are reading, such as dragons for a Wings of Fire book.
  • Button Quotes—Print out reading and writing quotes in fancy fonts for button-making, or have students write the quotes out themselves with art supplies (or both!).
  • Gift Boxes—Turn old greeting cards or book covers printed on cardstock into small gift boxes.

Codes/Clues

If you have some basic locks and boxes, you can create an endless number of clues to lead students to the solution, whether it’s a series of clues or a single one. Here are a few that I have tried.

  • Haikus—I created a series of haiku puzzles to solve related to The Trials of Apollo, including music notes to translate to letters that create words, Bananagrams tiles to rearrange, and a song to play from a flash drive.
  • Rebus Puzzles—Endlessly useful! Sometimes I’ll do a rebus that leads to a key, sometimes I’ll do a chapter title or book title rebus to solve, etc.
  • Invisible Ink—Always a favorite. Often this forms part of a two step puzzle; the first puzzle leads them to a locked box with a blacklight, and they use the blacklight to read the final clue—usually, where to find the cookies.
  • Foreign Languages—Clues that include foreign languages. For instance, when we read The Lightning Thief, I created a clue with key words written in Greek letters.
  • Book-Specific Clues—Clues akin to puzzles or incidents in the book you’re reading. For instance, when we read The City of Ember, I wrote the clue on paper that I crumpled and ripped up; the students had to put it back together to read it.
  • Directional Clues—For instance, I found book titles that had a direction in them (north, south, up, down, etc.), and wrote out clues to help students find those titles in our catalog. The direction in each title told the students how to solve a directional lock. You could also use a map from a book with a narrative describing a journey in various directions.
  • Book-Title Clues—I borrowed this idea from a friend: I gave students a grid of twelve books, with one book numbered to show them how to count. The code to the letters in the clue sentence were three digits in sequence, joined by dash marks. The first letter indicates which book, the second letter indicates which word in the title, and the third indicates which letter in that word.
  • Word-Puzzle Clues—For example, I wrote sentences in which some letters at the end of the first word combined with letters at the start of the second word spelled a number to help open a number lock. A sample sentence might start: “Teachers ix-nayed…” and the rest of the sentence is a red herring. Note: This one was really hard—too hard without lots of hints!

Matching Games

These are fairly quick and easy to put together.

  • First Line/Last Line—Match first or last lines of books to the appropriate title.
  • International Covers—Match international covers for same book with the nationality of their publication.
  • Globe-Trotting Covers—Match ten books set in different countries with the country in which they take place.
  • Teacher Childhood Favorites—Match faculty childhood photos with their favorite childhood book; this obviously requires some faculty participation!
  • Book Summaries—Match covers of new books to their summaries.

Writing Activities

The story-writing activities run a bit longer than I would usually allow for a starting activity; I mostly used these first two with club iterations that only shared a glancing relationship with books (writing, book games, literary smackdowns, etc.).

  • Write-a-Line Stories—Write the first two lines of a story or choose two lines from a book, then fold the page down so only the second line shows. (You could also create small booklets and write a sentence per sheet and fold it back, as folding a letter-sized page over and over gets hard!) The next person sees the second line or book sentence, and either writes the next two lines based on that, or finds two lines from a different book that could continue the story. Repeat until you run out of paper, and read the story aloud!
  • Round Robin Stories—Start a story, and pass it along to the next person to continue.
  • Review Haiku—Write reviews of books in haiku form.
  • Post-it Reviews—Create a post-it sized form with room for some stars, author and title, and a small space to write why someone should read this book. Display those books in the library, along with the recommendation. Borrowed idea from (I think) Travis Jonker.

Book Games—General

Some of these games take longer than others; play them just as long as they hold students’ interest!

  • Book Title Balderdash—Pick titles of several new books that won’t be familiar to the students. They will all write fake summaries, hoping to fool the other players when all of the summaries are read aloud, including the real one. This can be played with a Balderdash game board, or just for fun without counting points.
  • Book Title Pictionary—Pretty self-explanatory. Can be played in teams or as a group.
  • Book Title Telestrations—Based on the Telestrations game. A student takes a book title or character, and tries to draw it well enough for the second student to guess. That student writes down their guess and passes it on, without the drawing. The next student has to draw something based on that guess, and so it goes.
  • Name that book—Inspired by Name That Tune. Students “bet” on how many words from the first sentence(s) it will take for them to name a book, omitting identifying words like names. The kids found this one pretty hard, so adding a genre or using the summary instead of the first line(s) might help.
  • Trivia/Jeopardy—This takes a lot of time to put together, so would be for a special event, probably when you are all reading the same book. Alternately, if, like me, you have several hundred Battle of the Books questions hanging around, you could grab a few from the most popular books and just have at it.
  • Names in a Hat—In this game, everyone writes down a book title or character and throws it in an ersatz “hat.” On the first round, the person who is “it” draws one slip after the other, and can say anything (except what’s on the slip) to get the other players to guess what it is. They have one minute to get through as many as they can. At the end of round one, all the slips go back in the hat. For round two, the active player draws the slips again, but can say only one word to try to get the other players to guess the answer. For round three, they can only charade it.

Book Title Games

In these games, students must figure out book titles or words in book titles from the clues given.

  • Food Titles—Find clip art of food found in titles, and students use the catalog to find title(s) including that food. This could also work with other things, like animals, plants, etc.
  • Changed Titles—Give a description of books that would result if one word were removed from the real title/series title, and a hint. Students must identify the real title. Example: __ __ __ __     __ __ __ __ __ __  Ben Ripley attends an academy that focuses on being agile and flexible. (Series title, one letter added)
  • Emoji Titles—You can devise these yourself, or you can find some online. Line up some emojis that represent a popular book title. It can be straightforward, or use homonyms (like a peace sign representing the word “piece”). Here are the ones I used:

I love games and codes and crafts, so it’s always fun to come up with or hear about new, short activities I can use to combat my book-club kryptonite! I hope some of these prove useful to you.

FunJungle Escape Room

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I’ve been running escape rooms twice a year for a while, and always try to create or borrow one that has some connection to middle school literature. This time, I decided to go with Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series of humorous mysteries involving a zoo/wildlife park in Texas. Gibbs, author of the Spy School series, is one of the most popular authors in my library, so I figured his series was a good choice.

When I’m designing escape rooms, I generally go with a single-path design, in that students can’t open boxes out of order because the clues in one box lead to another. I look at the locks I have and figure out which ones will work best, and design puzzles around them. Since FunJungle has an extensive map available online, I chose to start with a directional lock—actually a Breakout.edu multilock that can be set to work with letters, colors, or symbols.

(Note of caution: With a multilock, if you are using symbols/colors, it’s not enough to write down the combination you chose. You also need to note how to hold the lock while opening, and if the combination reads left to right or right to left. If not, you, like me, might have the embarrassing experience of a lock not working because you forgot the proper lock orientation!)

Below is my escape room in the order of unlocking, and I’m happy to share any details or documents if you’d like to run it yourself. I usually include two clues in each box, with one clue leading to the next box, and the second clue being for a box further down the line.

  1. Map Clue Box—Directional lock

I printed and laminated a large map of FunJungle with starting text saying where Teddy went to search for Cappuccino, an escaped capuchin monkey. The order of Teddy’s search gives the directions for the directional lock.

  • Tasks: Print and laminate map
    • Create and print starting clue
    • Program multilock and detailed instructions for unlocking
    • Print and laminate URL for inclusion

In this box: Cutout cardstock for second box, laminated URL for third box: https://www.google.com/search?q=animal+sounds

  • Cutout Clue Box—Four digit number lock.

I found a page from a FunJungle book that included letters I could use to spell out numbers, in the proper order for this four digit lock. I also copied several other FunJungle pages as red herrings, but kept the actual page slightly bigger—it was only one that fit the cutout.

To create the cutout, I first mapped where my desired letters were on tracing paper. Then I laid the tracing paper on my cardstock and used an X-Acto knife to cut out the squares, so that laying the cardstock over the page revealed the letters. This took some fine-tuning to make sure the correct letters were visible.

  • Tasks: Find a page containing the appropriate words/lettersTo spell out the requisite numbers
    • Create cutout cardstock
    • Print out multiple pages of FunJungle books
      • One for the clue and others as red herrings
    • Program number lock
      • (Or just keep whatever it’s programmed to—the kids never remember!)

Components found in previous boxes: 1: Cutout cardstock

In this box: Flash drive, red film

  • Animal sound clue Box—Five-letter word lock

I went to Google and searched “animal sounds,” then used my phone’s voice recorder to record five of them whose names corresponded to the word I chose for this word lock (HIPPO). I used the free Audacity program to combine the sounds into one track in the proper order, and saved the track on a flash drive as “Super secret clue.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=animal+sounds

I used Flint AI to create a template of zoo-type animal labels, then added photos of ten animals, five of which are correct and five of which are red herrings. I printed and laminated them.

  • Tasks: Create a template for zoo animal information sheets
    • Find photos of ten animals and add them to the template
    • Print and laminate
    • Create a recording of animal sounds in order
      • The first letters of their species name create the word to open the word lock
    • Store recording on flash drive
    • Have a laptop available to play the file
    • Program word lock

Components found in previous boxes: 2: Laminated URL, Flash drive

In this box: Red-film-clue-obscured equation, blacklight

  • Red Film Clue Box—Four digit number lock.

With Flint AI’s help, I created a complicated but simple-to-solve mathematical equation that led to four digit answer. I turned this into a red-film clue by writing it in pencil, then used a red ball-point pen to scribble over it until it was illegible. Holding red film over the clue makes the underlying pencil legible again.

((50 + 10) x (200 ÷ 2)) + ((4 + 4) x (100 ÷ 2)) + ((20 – 4) x (10 ÷2)) + ((15 – 6) – (4 – 2))

  • Tasks: Create a suitably complicated equation
    • Turn it into a red-film clue
    • Source some red film, perhaps from theater or art department
    • Program number lock, if necessary

Components found in previous boxes: 2: Red film; disguised equation

In this box: Puzzle, laminated cryptowheel clue XBCECPOANIIW

  • Puzzle Clue Box—Key lock.

I created a collage of FunJungle book covers, and wrote a limerick on the back to identify where the key was hidden, using an invisible ink pen. Then I laminated and cut up the collage (Note: 5-6 pieces at most!!).

FunJungle has all kinds of these,

Found in donkeys and monkeys who seize

The one thing I need

To trap them indeed;

Find it where you get help for skinned knees.

(I hid my key in the first aid kit)

  • Tasks: Source an invisible ink pen and blacklight, plus batteries
    • Create a collage of FunJungle book covers
    • Create a limerick or other clue to identify where the key is hidden
    • Write it on the back of the collage BEFORE laminating
    • Laminate collage
    • Cut collage into 5-6 pieces
    • Hide key

Components found in previous boxes: 2: Puzzle, Blacklight

In this box: Cryptowheel

  • Cryptowheel Clue Box—Five letter word lock

I happen to have a wooden cryptowheel, so decided to make use of it. The way it works is that you turn the dials until you have legible words in one line (“Use word lucky”), then look at a different line and write down those letters as your clue. When students align the clue letters, they then turn the wheel until they spot the actual words.

I had my clue, XBCECPOANIIW, written on a document lying around, and in a box. The document I used was a school field-trip scavenger hunt form, created with the help of Flint AI, and filled out by my quietly hilarious colleague. I used the clue in one of the “name” fields, as if some smart-aleck thought it was funny.

  • Tasks: Source and program a cryptowheel
    • Program word lock
    • Create a field-trip scavenger hunt form
    • Fill out, with the code letters written on it somewhere
    • Create some other scavenger hunt forms as decoys
    • Cut out and laminate the clue
    • Print and laminate a photo of the “escaped” animal

Components found in boxes: 1: Cryptowheel clue (laminated)

In this box: Cookies & laminated capuchin monkey photo

Décor and red herrings:

You can do almost anything with décor and red herrings, going as detailed or minimal as you want. I’d do fewer red herrings for younger students, though—they do get off track! Here’s what I used in my room:

  • Scavenger Hunt, printed and filled out humorously and including Cryptowheel clue
  • FunJungle books
  • Animal stuffies borrowed from colleagues
  • Safari hat & binoculars borrowed from the theater department
  • “Missing animal” posters with template created by Flint AI, filled out by me

Conclusion

Escape rooms do take time to create and set up, but the kids love them and it’s a fun way to connect them with books and exercise their brains. Let me know if you would like to see any of the escape rooms I have created or borrowed!

“Fun kits to check out”: Action packs in action

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Last week, Matt Ball of Pace Academy sent a question out to our list about “Fun kits to check out.” Our library realized my dream of activity packs (named by my cooler colleagues: “Casti Library Action Packs,” or “CLAPs”) a few years back, and some back and forth on the thread suggested I should share some details here.

We find that the use of these packs fluctuates heavily in relationship to marketing and also school vacations, but we keep them going out of a commitment to outdoor and offline activities. I suspect that schools with elementary school students would have a much higher uptake.

My colleagues, Jole Seroff and Christina Appleberry, are spectacular at making things fun and engaging. I love the thematic papers they use! Students take a tag for the CLAP they want to check out and bring it to us at the circulation desk. We grab a pack for them.

We have five themes to our CLAPs at the moment, and the back of each check-out tag tells students what they will get with a given action pack:

In addition, these cards help everyone confirm that every item is there at both checkout and return.
Advancement gave us these cute knapsacks to hold our CLAPs. Each is tagged with a card showing the topic and a catalog bar code on one side.
Each CLAP tag again lists the items we can all expect to find in the bag. It helps us remember what is in the bag at checkout and return, and assists students as they prepare to return the bag to us. As a result, we have experienced very little loss of materials, making these packs a relatively inexpensive endeavor. Sometimes, there is an invitation to engage in a communal activity with the CLAP. (Note our inflatable pillow is a lice-proofable material…..)
The weaving and pompom kits include the choice of two colors of yarn. We bring students to this drawer to chose what they want. We have found our students to be responsible and return extra materials. In this drawer you can also see our extra looms, extra embroidery hoops, and the biggest investment from our CLAPs, Sashiko fabric with water soluble dots, by Olympus. Fun fact: you can also tell students are using these packs at school by the amount of artificial turf that has made its way into the yarn drawer!

While the CLAPs do not quite see the consistent use we would like, it gives us a lot of fun opportunities to connect with students, and also lets us extend active and passive programing (we had a stargazing event and we keep a simple loom warped and ready for us in the library) in a way that students can take with them.

Our larger loom, in between projects.
Examples of student watercolors of clouds. It took a while to get students to leave their images in, instead of ripping them out to hide them from others’ view, but we are starting developing a fun collection. Each one is dated, along with a location, type of cloud, and student name and grad year. It is really lovely to be building this visible history of relaxation within our community.
We also had a student design badges that students can collect as they complete each action pack. (We also love our button-maker!)

I know that other libraries are out there running similar programs. Please feel free to share in comments, and link to pictures or other information that you have. I still fantasize about putting together local literary outings (or even for other cities) — maybe walking tours of places that appear in MG and YA literature, or activities similar to those noted in books. I’d love to have Go-Passes, as well, that students could check out to attend different museums. Right now, we don’t have the traffic needed to justify those purchases, but I have my eye on the future!

Does your library offer something in this realm?

Contests, Part Two

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Happy summer, everyone! Here is the second half of my article on the contests I run with my middle schoolers.

Fortune Writing Contest. In this contest, students must write a better fortune than the ones they find in traditional fortune cookies. This contest is more of a lift for me, as I need to buy fortune cookies, steam them soft in the microwave so I can extract the original fortune and insert a student-written fortune. It’s such fun, though, to watch kids open a cookie and find a student fortune!

2022 Winner: Look forward, don’t look back, unless you’re driving, then you want to look back when merging. —Mia, 6th

Photo Finish. Before this contest, I hold a lunchtime meeting in which students cut interesting photos out of magazines and catalogs. During the contest, they must choose three photos from among all the cut-out photos, then write a story (at least three sentences!) that incorporates those photos. It’s another colorful contest, with all of those stories posted around the library!

Scenes From a [Virtual] Hat. This pandemic contest came from a game in the TV show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? With some help from colleagues and AISL, I devised a bunch of prompts, like “Most useless spell Harry Potter could learn,” “Things you don’t expect to hear when you put your ear to a seashell,” and “Scout badges we’ve never heard of.” I loaded them all into a wheel of choice widget that students could spin, and then they had to write a response to whichever prompt they got. This is another one I only ran once, though I would love to run it again!

2020 Winner: Failed ideas for Project Week: Axe throwing. –Hannah, 5th

Six Word Memoirs. This contest was inspired by a book: I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure. After some confusion about what a memoir is, though, I retitled the contest; it’s now the “Your Life in a Six Word Sentence” contest, as I was tired of getting lists of words! This contest actually inspires students’ most thoughtful writing, and on occasion, has alerted me to something I think our counselors should look into. You never know what you’re going to get!

2022 Winner: A bit messy, a bit magical.   –Virginia, 7th

Story in a Tweet/Story in Twenty-Five Words. This contest began when tweets were fairly new, with the original length of 140 characters. When that changed, I adapted the contest to keep the challenge of squeezing a whole story into a few words.

2020 Winner: She walked inside the house admiring the furniture, taste-testing the food, and tried out the mattresses. Unfortunately for Goldilocks, she was not at IKEA.  –Emily, 8th

Two-Sentence Horror Stories. An SLJ article by Rozanna Baranets inspired this contest. I challenged students to write either a funny or scary two-sentence horror story. They excelled!

2022 Scary Story Winner: Everyone always asks how many trick or treaters I get. But no one asks how many leave.  –Savannah, 7th

2022 Funny Story Winner: Through the darkness, a silhouette emerged. I screamed in horror as it said: “I’m here to talk about your car’s extended warranty.” –Andrea, 7th

Unlikely Superheroes. This contest came from a game in the TV show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? I challenge student to create an unlikely superhero with an unlikely power, and a ridiculous crisis for them to solve. Extra points if students write a short story showing how the superhero used their power to solve the crisis. This was a pandemic contest, and though it was a lot of fun, I didn’t get a ton of entries so have only run it once.

2020 Winner: Superhero: Taco Teen, who can create extra spicy tacos out of thin air. The tacos can dissolve enemies from their spicy salsa. Crisis: Two big cutting boards come alive and are trying to poke the city with the extra sharp knives! –Jon, 5th

World Book Contest. This contest requires a full set of World Book encyclopedias in print, with “World Book” written across the combined spines. The challenge is creating new words with the letters available.

Zip Code Poetry. A teacher alerted me to this NPR article about “Zip Odes” in Miami, and it seemed like a great idea for a contest. For this one, students chose a zip code connected with them (home, school, grandparents, etc.), wrote it vertically, and then penned a poem with the same number of words in a line as the corresponding number in the zip code. For zeroes, they could draw a picture or leave it blank. Obviously, this will work better in parts of the country without a lot of zeroes in the zip codes!

2023 Winner:

–Rylie, 7th