December Meeting: Funny Books and StoryboardThat Comics

Thank you to the brave Bookshoppers who ventured out in our first snowstorm of the season to come to the library and talk books! We had another great range of books read this month: Big Nate Goes Bananas by Lincoln Peirce; Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees by Ben Mezrich; The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora by Pablo Cartaya; The Bible; The Nerdiest, Wimpiest, Dorkiest I Funny Ever by James Patterson; and Funny Girl: Funniest. Stories. EVER. edited by Betsy Bird. Instead of sharing our books via booktalks, we each chose a favorite funny scene from our book and drew a short comic inspired by it (see below).

After pencil on paper comics, it was time to create online versions using StoryboardThat. It's a very user-friendly comic creation website with a pretty substantial free version, although we wanted full functionality so used a free educational trial. Everyone was very focused and made some awesome comics. It was hard to stop when our meeting time was over!

War by Arif

The Godless Germ by Emily

Comic #1 by Liam

Comic #2 by Liam

3 Little Pigs by Mickey

Unknown Story by Nathan

The Perfect Comic by Sean

Our next meeting will be on January 6th, and we will be discussing fantasy/science fiction books (some ideas are shown below) and playing with augmented reality. Have a great month!

          

 

       

November Meeting: Mysteries/Thrillers and an Escape Room Challenge

We had a full house for our second Bookshop meeting of the year, although we did have a few latecomers. Please do your best to come on time so we can stay on track for our book discussion and activities. Since we had several participants miss the first meeting, we did brief introductions again and chatted about some good things that had happened since our September meeting (two Bookshoppers had birthdays!).

Then we went around and shared the mystery/thriller/adventure books we had read for the meeting. The books shared were: a book with a forgotten title about a creepy mansion where dolls came to life; D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths by Ingri d'Aulaire and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire; The Bible; Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar; The Adventurer's Guide to Treasure (and How to Steal It) by Wade Albert White; The Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; some Spider-Man graphic novels; and Small Spaces by Katherine Arden.

After quick booktalks, we jumped right into a library-themed Escape Room Challenge designed by yours truly. The "room":

The challenge: The Bookshoppers had been so engrossed in their books that they missed the library closing announcements and got locked inside the library after-hours. They didn't want to set off any alarms and get in trouble, but then they remembered that one of the librarians had mentioned a door in the staff break room (shown above) that would let you leave without setting off an alarm. Unfortunately, there were three codes that had to be entered in the decoder first (re-purposed from Escape Room the Game and shown below) before the door would unlock from the inside.

Because the codes were hard to remember, staff had hidden clues around the break room to give hints about the three codes. All the group had to do was go to the staff room, find the clues, and enter the codes. They had 60 minutes before the motion sensors would come on, and the alarms would start going off when they moved.

Clues involved a puzzle, a word jumble, and decoding a bookmark. The group jumped into action and unearthed the hidden keys for the decoder and most of the puzzle pieces within minutes.

The actual puzzles stumped them for a bit, but with a few subtle hints, they were able to "escape" in 31 minutes and 34 seconds!

I was very impressed with their problem-solving skills and the way they divided and conquered the different puzzles. Some Bookshoppers expressed interest in further Escape Room activities, and there are some fun, free, online ones available here.

Our next meeting will be on Monday, December 2nd. Our book genre this month is funny books with some suggestions pictured below:

           

                                        
               

    

October Meeting: Welcome Back and Lego Challenge

Welcome back, Bookshoppers! It's wonderful to be back, and it was so nice to see some returning members from last year and meet several newcomers.

We got started chatting over pizza about the free choice books we had each brought to the meeting. There was a nice range of formats and genres represented: Bomb: the Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin (nonfiction), New Kid by Jerry Craft (realistic fiction graphic novel), a book from the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull (fantasy), Blended by Sharon Draper (realistic fiction), a book from the Keeper of the Lost Cities series by Shannon Messenger (fantasy), Stargazing by Jen Wang (realistic fiction graphic novel), and a book from the Warriors series by Erin Hunter (fantasy).

We followed our discussion up with a little icebreaker activity called "Would You Rather..." to start getting to know each other a bit better. We learned some very important things: most of us would rather be able to be invisible than be able to fly; most of us would rather live in the city than the country; most of us would rather have rainbow-colored hair than no hair at all; most of us would rather have a dog as a pet than a cat; most of us would rather be stuck reading only Percy Jackson books for the rest of our lives over only Harry Potter books; and more! It was an enlightening (and hilarious) exercise.

Finally, we got down to some serious team building using the library's Lego collection. We started off split into two teams with the goal to build a bridge out of Legos that was at least six inches tall, at least a foot long, and able to hold the weight of a book and two Lego people. The groups went about it in very different ways, with one group focusing on making a wide and stable base (but ultimately not making the bridge quite tall enough) and the other group using thin columns to make a tall but slightly less stable bridge. Then the groups combined their bridges, shoring things up and making them level, and we tested the strength and stability of the new and improved bridge, which was able to hold 17 Goosebumps books before it collapsed!

With the last few minutes, the entire group was challenged to build a Lego tower taller than the tallest Bookshop member but WITHOUT talking. It was a valiant effort, but the time crunch proved too much, and the tower crumbled just before it reached the forehead of the tallest Bookshopper.

Our next meeting will be on Monday, November 4th, and our book genre for the month is spooky/thriller/mystery because we'll be doing an ESCAPE ROOM for our November activity! If you need ideas of what to read, some of my favorite spooky books are pictured below: