December Book & Cookie Club: Rowan of Rin

Book & Cookie Club is a one hour long book discussion for students in 3rd through 5th grade and an adult caregiver.  I have been facilitating this program since December of 2015.  It is one of my favorite programs because I get to come up with new activities, icebreakers, and discussion games every month!

THE BOOK
This month, we read and discussed Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda.

THE PLAN
I always like to start our meetings with an icebreaker.  Our icebreaker for this meeting was a cryptogram that uses a quote from The Lord of the Rings. 

After the icebreaker, we conquered the obstacle course.  I created five obstacles on one side of our program room.  Participants had to complete the obstacle, then spin the wheel on the Decide Now! iPad app. I programmed the wheel to have the numbers one through three on it.  If a participant spun the number 3, then they had to answer three questions about the book before they could move onto the next obstacle.



Obstacles:  

1. Don’t wake the spiders: participants had to crawl through a tunnel without touching any of the spiders.
2. Ball toss: participants used their non-dominant hand to toss ping pong balls into cereal bowls. This one proved to be a challenge, but the kids got creative in order to make it work!
3. Domino sort: participants made a set of 6 dominoes
4. Find the ball: I hid different colored wiffle balls underneath cones.  Participants picked a color and had to find that color wiffle ball under the cone.
5. Tic-Tac-Toe: participants had the option of playing against their grown-up or against a friend

Once everyone completed the obstacle course, we moved on to the book related activities.  

Activities:

1. Matchstick puzzles:  I used toothpicks for this activity because...matchsticks. I just did a Google search for "matchstick puzzles" and printed off one of the puzzles that I found. 
2. Word puzzles
3. Map making:  I found some neat ideas on Pinterest on fantasy map making so I printed off those ideas and displayed them.  We have this neat brown Kraft paper on a roll that we use to cover our tables and I thought it would be awesome to use for a fantasy map.  I put out black markers and black colored pencils.

I loved seeing the adults and their kids work together to solve the puzzles.  The maps that the kids came up with were amazing.  I could kick myself because I forgot to take pictures of their awesome maps.  Overall, it was a fun evening!

Next month, we will be discussing The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy!

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"Matchstick Puzzle" Activity

Fantasy Map Making Activity

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ice_breaker_cryptogram.pdf
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rowan_of_rin_questions_word_puzzle.pdf
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