Board Games Played

• Pictureka!
• Candy Land
• Guess Who?
• Connect Four
• Operation
• Uno
• Hi Ho Cherry-O
• Sorry
• Chutes and Ladders

Story Time Gaming Activities

• Bingo
• Scavenger Hunt

First ever national gaming day at your library on November 15th, so of course I had to do something.  Okay, I went crazy and resolved to participate two days before the actual day, but that’s not bad considering that I only had a little less than two weeks notice.

The kids seemed to enjoy the free play board games.  I have an awesome staff to work with so I didn’t go insane.  I would have liked more teens, but this wasn’t on a weekday when we catch most of our teens.  No worries.  Actually had a parent ask if it was going to be a regular occurance.  Not that I can predict.  I’d need more games and I would rather having gaming in the library as a teen activity.  Ah well.

My manager thought that I was doing straight gaming in place of story time.  It ended up that way but I made organized game activities especially for the little ones.  Yeah, I made them the morning of actually.  Turned out pretty well considering that this was a game day for the little ones.  It’s all good.  There’s always the next game day.  The important thing is that I pulled one together!  I can now tell people that I was part of the first National Gaming Day @ Your Library.  I’m a gamer librarian!

BINGO

Instead of bingo markers that kids can choke on, I passed out little cupcake liners with plain M&Ms.  Why plain?  They’re small enough that they fit in the bingo squares, I don’t have to worry about a peanut allergy, and if they eat them oh well.  Okay, so not exactly the healthiest game, but the kids had an enjoyable time.  I warned them as I gave them the M&Ms that you could not win unless the bingo you’re claiming has an M&M on all the squares.  Eat them after.  Found a really neat Bingo card randomizer that I’ve used before from DLTK’s.  Of course I used the animal boards!  Just don’t try doing black out with the 5×5 cards.  I realized that EVERYONE would get black out at the same time, but that was okay since everyone got to win.

Scavenger Hunt

Okay, this was fun.  I have a nice big box of puppets at work.  I put them in fairly obvious places out of immediate reach of grubby hands.  Each library animal puppet held a bright card with a word printed on it.  I wrote out clues to the whereabouts of the puppets.  When you find the puppet, you copy their word and when you’re done you return to smiling librarian with big box of prizes.  Apparently kids can’t copy words correctly, but they had fun.  I think I had more fun hiding the puppets and writing the clues.  It’s nice because they’re in obvious places so the pages don’t hate me when small children wreck the shelves, and it doesn’t matter how many people play.  I just hand them the game sheet and I don’t care how many people play.  I might try this for class visits with bigger kids since it allows them to constructively explore the library.