This follows along the same lines as my Young Adult Book Cover Bingo games previously posted.

Click here for Young Adult Book Cover Bingo , my 2022 version

Click here for Young Adult Book Cover Bingo, my 2016 version

FOR THIS ONE . . . 

There are 30 different Harry Potter Bingo Sheets to choose from. 

Each sheet has the same 29 characters in a different combination. 

Like the other Bingo games I have made before, I forgot to make a hostess sheet with which to call out characters (like, "N Ronald Weasley"). 

Why do I ALWAYS forget this?!

Just print off a spare duplicate and cut out the characters, fold in half and drop them in a container to pull from along with the letters in a different cup to pull from. 

Here's the link for my Harry Potter Bingo Sheets! Happy playing.

AN UPDATE POST!

For a teen program several years ago, we played Book Cover Bingo. 

Here is an updated collection of Bingo sheets with newer published books. These YA books are predominately stand alone books - only 3 or 4 series books are included. 

We pulled books that are well circulated or are being talked about at our library.

There are 30 different sheets total. The same 24 books are used on each sheet.

 Click here for link to my new bingo sheets.

Click here for the orginal link to our Book Cover Bingo program from 2016.

 

I absolutely LOVE that time of year when Teens Top Ten voting comes around! There's something inexplicably exciting about sticking that orange YALSA speech bubble to the top part of a spine on a brand new YA book. At least for me there is.

What's great about this year, is we got to set up the display in our brand new YA area.

At our library we have two separate polls: vote for your favorite book and vote for your favorite book cover. They can choose up to 5 favorites.

In my experience, teens will sooner vote for their favorite cover than book, but it's a way to get their attention and encourage them to try one of those books.

Printing off the ballots on different colored paper doesn't hurt either. It helps prevent confusion when it comes time to tally up the votes.

And while this poll is inside the library, our team has been keeping busy with events outside the building. This means a fun flyer to hand out!

I feel inclined to say that while the YALSA speech bubble is orange, I neglected to take them off all of last years book spines so I might have taken some artistic liberty and changed that color. Just so there was less confusion... I sure hope that's ok!!

Last year the teens asked for a Percy Jackson scavenger hunt, this summer it was Harry Potter (YAY!!)

Because we had done a trivia based scavenger HP hunt earlier in the year with the younger HP book club group, this teen hunt was a little easier on me to create.
Planning a scavenger hunt in the library should be simple as long as you can come up with understandable clues, which I must admit is not my strong suit. In fact, (on reflection) my Percy Jackson hunt did quite a terrible job of explaining and hinting where things were. I'm much more pleased with Harry.

The goal of this hunt is to use the clue sheet to locate all 20 Chocolate Frog Cards and be the first team to do so. 

This clue sheet uses library furniture such as rugs, display cases and study carrels. For example, one clue says to "look for a piece of furniture in the shape of the deathly hallows" and gives a general area on where to find it. This is a little wooden display kiosk that's in the shape of a triangle.

Other clues would require players to use the library catalogue to locate certain material by either providing the author or book title in the clue. An example of this..."Many myths are spread about ginger haired people. Jacky Collis Harvey wrote a unique book on the history of these red haired folk. Locate this book for Ron's card." And of course if they look up this author they'll find we only have one title by her "Red: A History of the Redhead" and the card catalogue will tell them where to find this item.

The goal was to find all 20 chocolate frog cards printed off from Harry Potter Stuff on Tumblr.  This made preparation and set up really quick.  The cards were printed off on cardstock, cut out and hidden in plain sight. The clue sheets were printed off onto cute parchment paper.
Only one set of chocolate frog cards were hidden outside in our library garden. The others were hidden on furniture in the building or inside books.

Aside from written clues, there were 5 puzzle clues inspired by this HP Trivia Treasure Hunt. In fact, that particular game can be purchased from that link. The only thing you have to do is print it off (presumably) and provide clue locations. It looks very neat and was the basis for my HP book club trivia hunt.

Anyway, of these 5 puzzle clues, I made three word searches and two who-doesn't-belong type questions.

To discover the word search clue, players must solve the puzzle. The remaining letters will spell out the title and author of a book, which players must find.

Tip: Be sure to have these books ON HAND when you do this. Of the three word searches made, one book was checked out before I could grab it off the shelf

In the second set of puzzles, the kids had to decide who didn't belong in a house and then the correct answer would lead them to a non-fiction location where their card would be.

All in all, I'm not sure who had more fun with this- me, while I was creating it or the players who got to chase down their treasures. Nothing makes me happier then when I get to share my passion for Harry Potter with other fans. He's meant so much to me over the years.

Last summer our teen-driven Iron Chef program was so well perceived that they requested it again for this summer. And when you have such enthusiasm to plan an event like this from teens, then you HAVE to do it right! As someone who still hasn't seen the show, without our teens and fellow librarian blogs, I would have been at a complete loss on where to begin with this.

The main thing the teens wanted from this program was to create, eat and be judged but they were very concerned that I give them a secret ingredient to work with. Of course, this stumped me the most.  Last year it was green apples; this year it was blueberries and/or strawberries. Some other options were graham crackers or chocolate.

Two weeks before the program, our department had received a phone call letting us know someone would be bringing a group of 12 to the event. So when I went out the day of the program to buy supplies I bought quite a bit more that I normally would have.

Some ingredients not pictured above are milk, eggs, whip cream, spray butter, melted chocolate and of course our berries. The crowd favorites are always the pie crusts and tortillas.

To get us started we decide on groups (teams of two) and rules. Last time we played where each team claimed different ingredients but it ended up where the teams just shared what they all wanted. So this time, instead of ingredients being exclusive to separate teams,  we all just shared everything. They were given the option to have one item that could be exclusive to their team but decided against it. We really just let them make their own rules :p

On a separate table from the ingredients we had a work station which was assortment of baking and mixing supplies. This included a griddle, a chocolate melting pot, blender and an assortment of mixing bowls along with spoons, spatulas and alike. Cleaning the blender bowl sure did keep me busy though!
 

Pardon the ugly pink tablecloth *gag*

Each group made enough samples to share with the other teams before presenting their creation to the group.

To decide winners, each person was given two pom poms as voting chips with the instruction that only one team member could vote for themselves once. The two winning team mates were given colorful wire whisks with a badge that said Iron Chef Winner and the other groups were each allowed to choose something special out of our SRP prize box.

All in all, this is one of TAG's favorite, most talked about program of the summer and I'm sure we'll be bringing it all out again next year. Tip for next time though, you can never have too much whip cream!

January 6th is national bean day. Did you know that? Me neither, but one of our TAG members sure did! (You can always count on teenagers to know the most random things).

So needless to say, when this tidbit of information was shared, TAG unanimously decided our January program must have something to do with beans. Over the course of several more meetings, this program evolved (thankfully) from Bean Dip Buffet to Book Cover Bingo (originally beango...get it?).


For this program, the teens were really interested in the Bingo sheets and how we would play. We decided it would be easiest to have 24 book covers that repeated over all the boards. Choosing their top 24 books did take quite a while though!

I used a Bingo template from online and just added the book covers. On covers with small text (such as the original Perks of Being a Wallflower book) I instead used movie covers or whatever I could find with large text.

Last year our TAG group came up with a great idea for a Dirty Santa Book Swap program for December. This year we did it again.

  This program is incredibly low maintenance and that may be why it's one of my favorites.We ask that teens bring in one of their own beloved books from home to exchange for something new to read. Some kids choose to bring mix CDs as well as books and that's totally fine! Alot of teens even bring several books to give away - not just one.

The game is usually very quick and we just go around the room until all the books are gone.

This year, the teen program followed one of our kids program where we showed a movie and made crafts from Popsicle sticks, so the leftover craft supplies were brought over from that program.

No idea why this is sideways....

The teens at our library LOVE glitter and sequins, so anytime those can be incorporated into a craft is usually a huge plus imo.

But I can't forget to mention the big hit of the program, which was the Hot Chocolate Bar!

Amazon offers a set of seven different flavors which was bought, which included Smores, Pumpkin Spice, Chocolate Supreme, Caramel, Raspberry, Arctic White and French Vanilla. In this package there were 6 packages of each flavor so we were set. Walmart also had various flavors available such as Mint and chocolate, Cinnamon and chocolate, Butterscotch and chocolate, etc. Who knew there were SO MANY different hot chocolate flavors out there??


I opted to try the Arctic White first which surprisingly was very bland and disappointing. French Vanilla was the crowd favorite and only one girl was brave enough to try raspberry.

Because our community room where we have our programs does not have access to a sink (those are in the bathrooms and staff area downstairs) we needed a way to have hot water. Cue coffee pot. It took a little more effort than if we had had access to a microwave, but this worked out fine. It just had to have water added to it regularly since it's not a full-sized coffee pot.

Buying the hot cocoa and marshmallows was literally the only expense for this program. Next year, if we choose to do this again, I may run to the local thrift store or the book sale room and try to purchase a couple good book titles and fluff up the table though. Not that we didn't have some great titles, I think people are just hesitant to bring books they really enjoy to give away.

Board Games

While planning for Summer Reading, one theme TAG kept mentioning was Percy Jackson. Based on their book descriptions I think I loosely remember reading The Lightning Thief but that was the extent of my knowledge and unfortunately for this program, I couldn't get anymore input as to what they wanted to do with Percy Jackson.

So of course, I scoured Pinterest for any inkling of a direction to take this. Maybe it was my word searches, but I was not finding anything age appropriate to confidently offer my teens! Thankfully, where all else fails, Teen Librarian Toolbox (Olympians Week) pulled through for me.

The Scavenger Hunt: Teens helped to pick out the objects that would be hidden around the library, but since this was a scavenger hunt for them, they wanted to be surprised and play along.

Originally they had expressed an interest in all three of the twists the Teen Librarian Toolbox had to suggest, but in the end, it was just your average scavenger hunt. Well, as average as I know how to make them- this one being my first ever!

I attempted to incorporate Percy Jackson trivia and library building structures and objects to base my clues on. For example, on top of the YA display bookcase we have a huge plant so that clue read "It's not Thalia's pine tree but look for this plant. On top of this shelf lies something very useful to Percy" and of course, 5 little Riptides were waiting to be grabbed.

These objects were nothing elaborate either. Riptide was thin foam covered in blue duct tape with a picture of the actual Riptide taped on and the trident was a blue plastic fork. The camp flags were felt and the report cards were printed off versions I found online.

At the start of the hunt, individuals were grouped into teams and given a scavenger hunt clue sheet and brown paper bag. In preparation, I had made various objects from the books that teams would have to collect to put into their bag. Each team would take 1 item and leave the rest for the other teams to find. As well as the hidden objects, there were the golden coins placed sporadically around the library that acted as extra points. Some of the things on the clue sheet were trivia questions though, just to add some variety and that was one thing the teens said they would have liked to have seen more of.

They were given 35-40 minutes to complete the hunt and had to be back in the Community Room at the designated time. Upon their return we had snacks and tallied up their points! Surprisingly, none of the teams found all the items... but whether that was because of my terrible clues or time.... well, let's face it- it was probably me. Read my clues and you'll see what I mean!

This was a program that went over very well though. Kudos for Teen Librarian Toolkit for having it available.

And here's what the clue sheet (my cheat sheet) looked like for all you people out there who may be stumped on this like I was!

Here's a look at the Divergent edition of Clue teens played at our most recent End Of The World/ Dystopian program.

The rooms on the game board were made from movie images found online and it was all slowly pieced together to follow the format of the original game. I printed off the grid over 4 sheets of regular blue paper, glued them to sheet of poster board and sized the rooms accordingly... much harder than it sounds (at least for me).

Once all the rooms were fitted and glued on I realized I'd forgotten character starting spaces.  Oops! That's why they stick out the way they do. The book quotes around the board are to help tie them in a bit.


The game pieces were folded to stand up and the weapon pieces are images glued on to the back of those glass beads. That was one of our crafts for the program - glass bead magnets. From left to right images on beads are belt, glass shards, butter knife, syringe, Eric's gun and lit coals.

Weapons

Since this was a Dystopian event, we also watched the just-released Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire and played a Hunger Games inspired game called Panem To Panem based on the game Apples To Apples (I found the idea on a teachers resource website). Snacks for this were Dauntless chocolate cupcakes, Nightlock blue berries, Simulation Serum (orange jello) and Abnegation pretzels.

And in case you were wondering... a bubble magnets craft was also set out with images from different books/movies and sorts. That's why the weapons for Divergent Clue are made with glass beads.