June is a crazy month at the library. Besides the Summer Reading Program, there is also an inundation of people coming into the library for other programs.
One such group of people is the YMCA kids. They have a summer camp that lasts throughout most of the summer, and each week they have a theme. Before Summer started, their leader came in and spoke to me about their future visits so that we would have books out for them and be prepared in general.
Well, they came in on Thursday, and we took it a step further. For 35 kids, we designed a criminal observation program. We asked the kids to use their keen skills of observation to find 3 pieces of concrete evidence in order to bring the culprit to justice.
I got to wreck the page area, and then we left behind a fingerprint, a shoeprint, and a message written in code. After fingerprinting themselves and identifying what types of prints they had, they had to match the fingerprint to the prints of four suspects. They also had a copy of four shoeprints which they had to match to the one at the crime scene. Finally, they had to decipher a code to figure out what the secret message said. We planned on making the clues easy, but as it turned out, they were way too easy. Every kid was able to figure out who committed the crime, and they all had fun doing it. As I'm not well versed in programming, I ended up deferring to the more experienced staff at the library. At the end, I got to clean up the page area, and the kids got to keep a copy of their fingerprints. All in all, it was another big success!
They'll be back in two weeks for Culture Shock! I haven't figured out what to do then yet.
One such group of people is the YMCA kids. They have a summer camp that lasts throughout most of the summer, and each week they have a theme. Before Summer started, their leader came in and spoke to me about their future visits so that we would have books out for them and be prepared in general.
Well, they came in on Thursday, and we took it a step further. For 35 kids, we designed a criminal observation program. We asked the kids to use their keen skills of observation to find 3 pieces of concrete evidence in order to bring the culprit to justice.
I got to wreck the page area, and then we left behind a fingerprint, a shoeprint, and a message written in code. After fingerprinting themselves and identifying what types of prints they had, they had to match the fingerprint to the prints of four suspects. They also had a copy of four shoeprints which they had to match to the one at the crime scene. Finally, they had to decipher a code to figure out what the secret message said. We planned on making the clues easy, but as it turned out, they were way too easy. Every kid was able to figure out who committed the crime, and they all had fun doing it. As I'm not well versed in programming, I ended up deferring to the more experienced staff at the library. At the end, I got to clean up the page area, and the kids got to keep a copy of their fingerprints. All in all, it was another big success!
They'll be back in two weeks for Culture Shock! I haven't figured out what to do then yet.
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