Librarian Resources
The Great Scavenger Hunt Contest™ is designed to be a year-round, turn-key programming solution. As part of the program, I’ve created several resources to help you launch and manage The Hunt with minimal time, money and headaches. I’ll be adding to this section regularly to include more ideas and tools to make your life easier.
In addition to my resources here, I’ll also be adding tips, tricks and ideas from librarians in the field. You’ll find the first of those below with more coming soon! I’ll even be hosting fun challenges during the year to reward you for sharing your ideas – with prizes like official Great Scavenger Hunt Contest™ bookmarks, participating books for your library and more. Watch for details about upcoming challenges in the monthly Hunt newsletter!
Read on for great resources to help you manage The Hunt or jump directly to the section of your choice:
Ready-made promotional materials
Easy administration tools
Tips, tricks and ideas
Ready-Made Promotional Materials
The Great Scavenger Hunt Contest™ flyer
This printable flyer is designed to be displayed in your teen or kids section. It gives hunters a quick intro to what The Hunt is all about.
Looking for a super quick and easy way to promote the program in your library? Simply print the flyer and display it in a prominent location along with a selection of participating books from your collection. Done!
Monthly update flyers
This printable flyer is a great thing to print each month and display for readers for see. It announces the winning hunter and host librarian plus all the new titles added to the program that month. Here are the most recent monthly flyers:
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
Easy Administration Tools
Current trivia challenge list by category
To make it easy for you and your hunters to see which books you have, I created a list of the trivia challenges available in each category with check boxes. There are two versions of the each list for your convenience:
Middle Grade/Tween: by author, by title
Young Adult: by author, by title
Print off the list(s) and check off the books you have in your collection. Display a copy with your main Great Scavenger Hunt Contest™ display, keep the list at the reference desk, or post it on your bulletin board. However you share it, you’ll make it easy for hunters to choose books and participate.
Tips, Tricks and Ideas
Notes from librarians
Thanks to all the wonderful librarians who have graciously shared their ideas and enthusiasm for The Great Scavenger Hunt Contest™. We appreciate you! To share your ideas with other librarians, simply send me your ideas via the online contact form. I’ll post them with full credit given to you.
I love The Great Scavenger Hunt Contest! In these tough economic times when we are all trying to cut back, it is great to know that there is someone out there that encourages teens to use their public libraries! You can tell that Kay Cassidy is a true book lover and encourages children to read in a variety of venues. Thank you so much, we really appreciate you. I plan on promoting The Great Scavenger Hunt along with National Teen Read Week, Oct. 19th through the 24th. My teens that have participated, have asked if they can submit another entry. (The answer, of course, is YES!)
~ Debbie Henricks, Evergreen Community Library, Metamora, OH
Down here in Barefoot Bay, at South Mainland Library, we have a growing number of teens helping with our summer reading program. We have been using puppets and props to share stories with the little ones, but I have wanted to get the older kids excited about reading stories for older grades and then sharing them, much as Story Pirates do. So here is my plan: use one of our new 2009-2010 Sunshine State Young Readers Award books which also happens to be on the Scavenger Hunts for Middle Grades/ Tween.
The book in mind is The Misadventures of Maude March by Audrey Couloumbis. We have both book and cd-spoken for this title and we will use this story to inspire us to recreate one of the adventures. To get ready, we will have a book club discussion of the book and listen to passages on CD. By the time we are ready to present the story, we will have many readers ready to “ace” this trivia quiz and ready for more.
~ Emily Derrough, South Mainland Public Library, Micco, FL
In addition to advertising the Great Scavenger Hunt in the library, I am also using the titles as book discussion books. Each month we have a teen/tween book discussion, I choose a book from the available list and the kids in the group have a month to read it. Then at the meeting we discuss the book and at the end I give out the quizzes to the participants. It’s a great way to encourage participation in the contest and in our book discussions!
~ Karen Golding, Goshen Public Library, Goshen, NY
I’ve created bookmarks listing the books that we have in our library and will update them as we purchase more of the eligible books. [The Great Scavenger Hunt Contest] will also be on my morning announcements tomorrow.
~ Susie Highley, Creston Middle School, Indianapolis, IN
I just began advertising for the Scavenger Hunt 4/30. I have a corner shelf that I’m using and I pulled all the books that we had checked in that are on the list on display. I used the promotional poster as well. I also sent an email to the teens and told them about the display and their potential of winning a $50 Barnes and Noble giftcard. I also asked them in the email to look at the full list of books online and let me know if they had any in particular from the list that they’d like me to order. I hope we get a good response from this contest. It’s a fantastic idea!
~ Mary Hoffer, North Webster Community Public Library, North Webster, IN
Here at our library we have printed out a copy of all the Scavenger Hunt books that we have available in our system to make it easier for the teens & tweens to find a book for the contest. (We are toying with the idea of making a special label to place on the book so if they see it on the shelf they will know it is a part of the contest.)
We have a link to the site on both our myspace and facebook pages for our teen and tween patrons. We used the paint & publisher programs to tweak the website flyer so that it had our library information posted on it.
It is listed on our patron calendar as well as in our press releases. We have a bulletin board in our teen room that lists the special events and the flyer we made is posted on that board as well.
For summer reading we are having a raffle contest with various prizes. If the teens participate in one of our programs (including the Scavenger Contest) they get an extra entry into our contest. We have also posted the link on our internal Youth Services homepage so the other librarians in our system know what a great contest and program this is.
~ Jennifer L. Hopwood, Franklin T. DeGroodt Memorial Library, Palm Bay, FL
I’m the librarian at a medium sized youth detention facility, so I’m not sure how applicable this is to anyone else, and it certainly isn’t as cool or high tech as it could be “on the outs” =). We recently reorganized the library to give us more space and I had an extra table as a result, so we gathered up all the books we own that are participating in the hunt and set them out with copies of the scavenger hunt questions. I set it up by our circulation desk so everyone would be sure to see it. Just today I’ve had several kids ask about it, and one’s already started on the hunt!
~ Melissa S. Jensen, Platte Valley Youth Service Center Library, Greeley, CO
Our Summer Reading Program is for kids ages 5-12. This is my second SRP and I’m really glad that I’m doing the Scavenger Hunt because there are so many kids ages 13 and up that either want to come to the SRP on their own or bring their younger brothers and sisters but cannot participate. So I’m gearing the Scavenger Hunt toward them, this way they can be involved in the whole summer reading thing too.
We’re also throwing in our own prizes and doing our own drawing in addition to the official contest. It’s pretty awesome, and I can’t wait for summer to get into full swing! I can’t wait to hear ideas from other librarians on how to better promote this program, I’ve been promoting it on myspace, the local newsletter, and flyers in the library but I’d like to do some more creative things. Thanks!
~ Ashley Schafer, Carter Lake Public Library, Carter Lake, IA
I think your scavenger hunt was sent to me on a listserve last month, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The Decatur Public Library’s Teen Summer Reading Program 2009 theme is “Find yourself in a book” and the books are picked from scavenger hunt categories, and there is an in-house scavenger hunt for teens to do. So your program fits in perfectly with this theme.
I’ll put up posters of your hunt along with my reading program posters, and have a mention about them in the entry form/brochure to encourage even more reading. Thanks for putting together this great Great Scavenger Hunt!
~ Eleanor Wood, Decatur Public Library, Decatur, IL
Tips from Kay
Tip #1 – Put a link to the hidden answer keys web page and the contest entry form web page on the desktop of the main librarian’s computer on the floor. That’ll make it easy for any librarian manning the desk to review completed trivia challenges and enter hunters in the contest. (You’ll receive links to these librarian-only resources after you register.)
Tip #2 – Put a link to the main hunt page (www.kaycassidy.com/hunt/) on each of the computers your kids or teens use. Making it easy for them to view and print trivia challenges is a definite bonus.
