Wednesday's Post: The Dewey Race

  Yesterday I did a program we did for the first time at the library. We are a member of the Collaborative Summer Reading Program. Our theme this year was One World Many Books. One of the activities in the guide is the Dewey Race. I was going to take pictures but we were very busy and I didn't get a chance for someone to get the camera out of the safe for me.

 If you ever watched the show Amazing Race, you would have a general idea of what this program is like. If you do not know the show, the Amazing Race, basically it is a game show which teams compete in challenges all around the world to get prizes and win a grand prize of $250,000. Obviously we do not have prizes like that at the library, but we had some cute little prizes and lots of fun. Basically the point of this program was to teach the kids about the Dewey Decimal system. I did do an introductory mini lesson about it. It was hard to tell if the kids were taking it in our just anxiously waiting for the event to begin. The ages of the kids at this program were 7-11. I would say though ages 8 and up is better. We had one 7 year old and I don't know if it was because he was confused about some of the challenges or was bored, but he left his partner mid race.

  Instead of visiting different countries and doing different challenges, the children were to visit different parts of the Dewey Decimal system and do different challenges related to certain Dewey Subjects. For example, for the 800s, they had to either read a poem or fill in the blanks in the poem of missing words. Since this was the first time we did the program, certain things do not go as planned. It appeared one of the volunteers was confused about distribution of the pitstop prizes (they had to go to dewey section pit stop and present their "passports"). They gave prizes to each team at each pit stop. They were supposed to give the prize to the first place finisher. This however worked out okay, because more kids were able to get the small prizes. Also, since it was the first time we did this program, the volunteers had some confusion about the challenges and it was hard to get things moving because of the confusion (also on the kids' part too). Now that we "ironed out the kinks", next year, if we do it, it would be easier because I would know how it would go. Obviously I would have to totally change or mildly alter some of the challenges, but it would still work.

 I would definitely recommend this program in the library. Here are the modifications I would make if I did it next year:

1. Make sure the volunteers have a little more training regarding the challenges and prizes.
2. Make sure you have enough supplies for the challenges for all the kids (it was difficult because we had some people attend the last minute), but I would overestimate next time.