Guest Post: Life-Size Board Game

If there's one thing librarians are always looking for, it's engaging, low-cost programs for kids and teens.* Ashley Pickett, the children's librarian at Flower Memorial Library in Watertown, talks about her experiment with running a life-size board game program for tweens:

 

On Tuesday, March 31st, we held the first of our tween programs at Flower Library--Life-size Sorry. We consider tweens those who are ages 9 to 12. We've held these programs in the past, but not consistently throughout the year--our goal is to have at least one program for them a month, and one per week during our Summer Reading Program. 

 

There were rumblings from this age group a couple years ago that 'there was nothing for them' and that 'this was too babyish,' meaning they weren't finding a place where they belonged in our past program offerings. Initially to start, we decided to simply take our teen programs down a notch to make them a little easier for tweens to handle. Now we're off and running with some ideas that make even our current teen and adult patrons envious!

The program took two librarians about a half hour to set up (and about another hour to actually create and print the game board-- I'm more than willing to share the game board with anyone who is interested!). Each piece of the board was printed on cardstock and taped down with masking tape. We wanted to use the kids as pieces, but didn't want to destroy our board so we purchased small cones that were about a foot high and used those instead. The kids were still excited to move "giant" pieces around the board. We ran the program from 2:30pm - 3:30pm during Spring Break, which was just enough time to finish a game with 1st and 2nd place winners. 

 

Ashley Pickett, left, and her tween crew trying out life-size Sorry.

 

I was originally concerned that we would get a rush of kids because of the date and pulled some of our regular board games out just so we had something to occupy them with, but we ended up with 13 players and things went pretty well! As much as I wanted to use giant cards too, we ended up using the cards from the regular Sorry game because it was just too much to print.

We ran the game just like you would a regular board game and the program was a blast! But as always, there are some things that I would definitely do differently next time...

 

-Print labels with their team color for kids to wear on their shirts. I had trouble remembering who was on what team at first!

 

-Assign teams as groups of kids came in. It was surprisingly hard to get them to divide into teams once the program started.

 

-Make a rule that only the team making the play can suggest moves. Other teams tried pressuring kids into moves and things got over-the-top competitive.

 

-Ask kids to sit down when it is not their turn. We had some problems with a few kids hopping all over the board and making the pieces out of place. It also made it hard for me to remember who was up next!

I was glad we...

 

-Asked the kids to help us come up with the game rules before we began playing. Turns out I have been playing the game a little differently than most my entire life!

 

-Teamed kids with their older siblings and encouraged parents to stay in the room. It helped when things got out of hand.

 

-Printed our board on cardstock. There is no way it would have survived as long as it did if it were on regular paper!

We had so much fun that I'm going to run a family Life-size Chutes and Ladders program this summer! We even joked about playing the game as a stress reliever during our next staff development day... :)

 

Sounds like a great time! Check out more children's room news and updates from the Flower Memorial Library on Facebook!

 

*And office supplies. There are a lot of stereotypes about librarians, but somehow our collective yearning for office supplies has gone unnoticed.