Last night we had our Family Book Club for the book Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics which is the sequel to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library. It was a cute book about libraries and banned books, not quite as good as the first in the series but still a fun book. I felt like I had gone above and beyond in preparing this book club and was really hoping it would go well. Sometimes you spend tons of time planning something and then it flops, but this time everything went great. First of all we talked a little about banned books and the difference between a challenged and a banned book. Then we played a game about matching the first sentence to the correct book. In our book one of the Olympic games was about matching the first sentence, so I did the same thing using books we've read for our family book club in the past. The kids did so amazing and I wasn't able to stump any of them even though some of them were pretty hard. We talked about how a great first sentence is important to really hook someone from the very beginning.
In the Library Olympics book one of the games they play is identical to the game Kahoot that the kids play at school sometimes. It was funny because the book is describing every detail, including the colors and sounds, except for actually calling it Kahoot and the kids knew right away what game the author was talking about. Luckily I have subbed in classes where we played the game so I had some idea what it was like. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have been able to pull this one off. Kahoot is a quiz game where each person uses their own smartphone, Ipad, laptop etc. and puts in a game code and then they can all play the game against each other. For example, you have the main computer screen with the quiz questions and then the kids answer it on their Ipads and it is all synced up and gives instant feedback. It did take me some time to figure out how it worked, but I was able to create an account and then make up my own quiz with questions from the book for them to answer. I really put a lot of thought into my questions and answers. Lexi particularly liked the one about "On what day were a lot of books burned in 1497?" The answer is Shrove Tuesday but one of my incorrect answers was Dewey Decimal Demolition Day. While we were reading the book we talked about how much alliteration there was so that answer was pretty much perfect! I spent far too much time getting the Kahoot ready, but it was gratifying to see how much the kids liked it. After we did the quiz I made we had to do another quiz too (a Harry Potter one) and now they know we can play Kahoot at home they are going to want to do it all the time! It's a great educational game though and there are quizzes on everything under the sun, most of them created by teachers (not just over-enthusiastic moms!)
After playing Kahoot we looked at a list of 30 of the most popular banned children's books and talked about reasons books get challenged. Some of the silliest reasons: talking animals, policemen that are drawn as pigs (in Sylvester and the magic pebble,) accidentally banning Brown Bear, Brown Bear because the author had the same name as a different challenged author, Harriet the Spy teaching kids to spy, etc. Finally we got to the best part...dessert! In the book, the main character, Kyle, thinks all days that deserve celebrating are "cake days." So we had red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. I had planned on making my own cake but after spending so much time planning the rest of our activities I went the easy route and just bought one! It was pretty delicious!
Another successful Family Book Club in the books (haha! See what I did there?!) Now we are moving on to Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin. We've been doing a lot of similar books lately and this one will be a change of pace. It's got a lot of Chinese folklore in it and that should be fun.
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