Summer Reading 2015 started last week (June 4) at our library. Our kickoff party was a blast! We had special musical guests out on the plaza. We had craft stations for the kids to make superhero masks and magic cuffs/bracers (a la Wonder Woman). We had stations to help the kids come up with their superpowers or their superhero name. We had a Superhero Training Mission (scavenger hunt). It was awesome.
I worked on our Superhero Training Camp Obstacle Course. I worked with a couple of coworkers to develop the plan, then I built most of the pieces. I also worked the Course while dressed like Harley Quinn (sans makeup) and heckled the kids and gave them the “backstory” for why they were doing the Course (I had kidnapped their sidekicks and they had to rescue them.
Our course started with the kids having to break through a “super sturdy brick wall” that I told the kids was built to withstand the Hulk, the Thing, Superman, or that big guy over there. Once they were through the wall, they had to crawl through “this really gross tunnel that I loaded with snakes an’ spiders, an’ other gross gooey crawly things.” Finally, they had to navigate my “laser death grid” and they were warned that touching the lasers would burn off their cabooses. Once through the “lasers”, they snagged a doll wearing a cape and mask and had to return through the lasers and the tunnel. Many of them came back three or four times.
Here’s a video showing the obstacles:
As you can see, it was a fairly easy build. The wall was several cardboard boxes wrapped in brown paper and painted to look like bricks (or brownstone). The tunnel was a rainbow tunnel we keep in our play area. The “lasers” was half a skein of yarn crisscrossed and taped across the room. If I did it differently, I’d probably move back the carpet so I could have some vertical lasers. A lot of our little kids were small enough to crawl right underneath the lasers entirely, and I had hoped for a more high-stepping, ducking and weaving approach.
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