Category Archives: Chapter Book Projects

Adventure Awaits

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adventure awaitsSolve the riddles, find 3 keys, and discover an ancient temple at To Be Continued, our chapter book story time for ages 6-8. Crawl inside the temple to find treasure, but be warned – the traps hidden within these dark walls will make your blood run cold. Unless, of course, you like traps. Then it’s going to be AWESOME!

We read Addison Cooke and the Treasure of the Incas by Jonathan W. Stokes (Philomel Books, 2016). Addison Cooke and his younger sister Molly live in New York City with their  Aunt Delia and Uncle Nigel, who are world-renowned archeologists. Uncle Nigel has just discovered the first of three mythical Incan keys rumored to lead to a vast treasure. Unfortunately, Uncle Nigel’s nemesis, the ruthless Professor Ragar, wants that treasure very badly. He kidnaps Uncle Nigel and Aunt Delia, expecting them to lead him to the treasure. But what he doesn’t expect is the intrepid Cooke children mobilizing their friends and, with the assistance of Uncle’s credit cards, heading off to South America to beat Ragar to the treasure and rescue their family. Caiman-infested rivers, booby-traps in buried treasure vaults, limousines driven by panicky middle-schoolers…nothing can stop Addison Cooke when he sets his mind to something!

When the kids arrived at story time, I read them the first of 4 clues. This led them to a plastic box with a key and a clue to the next box (here’s the template for the keys if you’d like it).

clue box with key The 3 box locations were quite some distance apart on Princeton University’s campus, so there was a fair amount of excited running. Marissa went with the gang, and managed to get some great action shots.

prospect garden clueHere’s my favorite. Look at those feet coming completely off the ground!

feet off groundI don’t know about you, but I find rhyming clues really challenging to write. Especially when you want the kids to figure out where to go without being too obvious or clunky. I was, however, pretty happy with this one. Here’s a photo of the location:

chapel clue settingAnd here’s the clue that led to it:

It’s time to hurry! The last key awaits!
Next to the Chapel, in a special place.
Facing Firestone, peaceful and bright,
Benches of stone and flowers of white.

While Marissa and the kids were finding keys around campus, I was busy setting up the mysterious temple back at the library. It was a whopping 87″ long and 50″ high. We used 15 boxes, 2 tubes, 7 cardboard flats, multiple rolls of packing tape, and gray paint we had left over from this knight helmet project. The temple broke into three pieces so we could get it out of storage, hustle it through a doorway, and set it up in the gallery.

Incan templeHere’s a shot from the side so you can get an idea of the size and how we constructed it.

side of Incan templeThe ramp in the front of the temple lifted to reveal a felt-covered doorway. From there, kids entered a creepy, cob-web covered chamber illuminated with votive LED candles. One at a time, the kids crawled across a floor rigged with bubble wrap to snag a golden treasure box (which we lit from above with an LED light mounted in the top of the treasure vault box).

interior of templeThe minute the treasure left the vault, it triggered cardboard spikes dropping from the ceiling! That was me outside the box, manually raising and lowering the spikes from a slit in the ceiling. There was lots of laughing and screaming. Good times!

interior of temple with spikesThe characters in the book have a couple run-ins with caiman, so the final touch was an alligator puppet (operated by Marissa) that snapped at the kids as they exited the temple. The hard-earned treasure boxes were plastic jewelry boxes I found at the Dollar Store. They were loaded with plastic gemstones as well. Each kid received a treasure box, and, to make reloading the treasure vault easier, we cut a little trap door in the back of the box.

treasure box and gemsAfter everyone had received a treasure box, we opened the temple back up and just let the kids have fun entering and exiting, dodging the spikes. Some of the younger siblings tried too (sans spikes of course). And then there was this little baby who was totally fascinated by the interior of the temple. She hung out for quite a while!

brave babyAddison Cooke and the Treasure of the Incas is a fantastic read-aloud. It’s hilarious, adventurous, faced-paced, with strong strains of Indiana Jones and The Goonies. Definitely looking forward to reading more books in this series!

Don’t Wake The Giant

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don't wake the giant

Besides having exquisite taste in socks, these two clever girls came up with a book project that was much cooler than my book project. It involves giants, snoring, caves, and castles perched in a precarious place. It was for To Be Continued, our story time for 6-8 year-olds.

We read The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, written by Jennifer Trafton, and illustrated by Brett Helquist (Puffin, 2010). Persimmony Smudge has lost her hat, and her way, in a woods filled with poison-tongued jumping tortoises and restless mangroves. Little does Persimmony know that she is about to be a part of a much bigger dilemma – one that involves a castle, a bratty king, a mountain that rises and falls according to the time of day, and rumors of a snoring giant under said mountain. And then there’s the revolt at the pepper mill, the prophecy of the Lyre-That-Never-Lies, and the growing indignation of the most terribly polite Leafeaters. Will the island be shaken to pieces by the giant? Or will Persimmony and her friends be able to stop this terrible fate?

In the book, elderly Theodore the Potter makes Giving Pots. Basically, there are pots that give you what you need, not what you want. Persimmony’s pot, for example, gives her a single feather (and it turns out later she really, really, really needs it!). I loved the idea of making Giving Pots, so I brought out a slew of Model Magic. Love this stuff. It’s light, no mess, and it dries beautifully (it makes great mandrakes too).

giving pot

Before the kids started sculpting, I asked them to recall a passage from the book that described the beautiful artwork of the Leafeaters. Here’s the passage:

“The walls were elaborately painted with glorious pictures of trees. There were coconut palms bent sideways from the wind. There were clusters of mangrove trees as they grew at the forest’s edges along the shore. And there were stately willows with boughs drooping to the ground like green waterfalls.

The dome above was painted to look like the sky with the sun and moon and stars. Farther down were hundred of pictures stretching in a circle around the room – pictures of Mount Majestic, of fields ripe for harvest and orchards ripe for picking, of fishing boats on the sea and brown seals on the rocks, of goats and squirrels and pelicans.”

Here are the beautiful nature-influenced Giving Pots the kids created:

When the kids finished their Giving Pots, I dropped a single white duck quill feather into them. Because like Persimmony, you never know when you might need it!

So that was my project. However, two story time attendees were trying to guess what the Mount Majestic book project would be, and decided to send in one of their own! It was a contest to see who could keep the castle on their belly the longest while holding up the Snoring Cave. It’s a perfect match to the book (the giant originates in the Snoring Cave and the castle is located directly above him on Mount Majestic). Awesome.

don't wake the giantDid you recognize the castles from a previous To Be Continued? They were the project for Castle Hangnail. Nice to see them make a triumphant return!

Ewer Unique Essence

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ewer unique essenceIt’s a mysterious bottle filled with a unique, glowing essence. What could the essence be? Happiness? Triumph? Panache? The Thrill of Your First Ride on the Back of an Arachnimammoth? This radiant project was part of To Be Continued, our chapter book story time for 6-8 year-olds.

We read The Creature Department by Robert Paul Weston (Razorbill, 2013). Elliot von Doppler is thrilled when his uncle Archie invites him to his workplace for a tour. Uncle Archie works in the top secret Research and Development Department at DENKi-3000, a company known for its amazing inventions. Elliot and his new friend Leslie soon learn that Uncle Archie’s secret department is staffed by creatures – bog nymphs, fairy-bats, knucklecrumplers, and bombastadons (to name a few). But DENKi-3000 is also in trouble. If the Creature Department doesn’t come up with a ground-breaking new invention in a few days, the company will be taken over by the relentless Quazicom Corporation. But, like DENKi-3000, Quazicom isn’t quite what it seems…

In my favorite part of the book, Elliot and Leslie visit “The Abstractory,” an enormous library/pantry that houses millions of bottles. Inside each bottle are different creature essences – namely, the special feelings, thoughts, and emotions that power creature inventions. Some essences are simple, like “Justice.” Others are more complicated, like “The Overwhelming Suspicion Something Big and Hungry is Hiding Under Your Bed.” Depending on their contents, the bottles glow, vibrate, flash, shimmer, and rattle. We wanted to capture a little of that fun with this project. Hence, a glow-in-the-dark bottle that contains an essence of your own making, complete with label.

finished bottleBut, because DENKi-3000’s research and development department is shrouded in secret, the entire project came as a take-home kit with strict instructions to NOT open the box until you get home.

DENKi-3000 boxYou’ll need:

  • 1 small glass bottle with lid
  • 1 rectangle of white card stock (ours was 2.25″ x 2.75″)
  • Glow-in-the-dark pigment or paint (more on this later)
  • 1 paintbrush
  • 1 square of glitter tulle (ours was 3.5″ x 3.5″)
  • 1 small bottle label with string
  • 1 wooden stirrer (we used a 4.5″ craft stick)
  • Scissors and white glue for construction
  • Pen

Below you can see the contents of the kit. There’s a glass bottle, a container of white glue, a plastic bag of glow-in-the-dark pigment, a wooden stirrer, a paintbrush, a rectangle of white card stock, a square of glitter tulle, and a small label with an elastic string. We gave the kids 1 extra piece of card stock and 1 extra piece of glitter tulle, just in case they messed up. Not pictured in the photo – a set of kit instructions.

creature bottle kit First, the bottle! We used 2.25″ screw-top jars scored from the wedding section of Michaels craft store. 20 jars cost $21, but we had a 40% off coupon. Woot! To make it look less like a spice jar, we hot glued a clear flat glass marble on top of the lid.

empty creature bottle

Use the paintbrush to paint the inside of the bottle with glow-in-the-dark glue or paint. We used non-toxic glow-in-the-dark pigment (read about it here) mixed with white glue. Why? We wanted the kids to feel like little alchemists – pouring the pigment into the glue, stirring it with a wooden stick, and watching it transform into glowing goo.

mixing glow glueThe glow glue goes on opaque, but as you can see below, it dries semi-transparent. Glow-in-the-dark paint (which we found in the t-shirt decorating section of Michaels) also dries transparent:

treated bottlesThe glow glue, however, glows much stronger. Perhaps because you can control the ratio of pigment to glue? But the paint is glowing. And it requires a lot less measuring and mixing. So you can’t go wrong with either choice.

treated bottles in the darkIt’s time to create your creature essence! This is basically a card stock shape wrapped in tulle. Since we wanted the bottles to also look pretty in daylight, we went with glitter tulle, which you can find in the ribbon section of Michaels.

Cut the card stock into your desired shape (we went with a spiral). Make sure the shape fits in the bottle! Then, paint both sides of the shape and the tulle with glow-in-the-dark glue or paint (we recommend doing this on top of wax paper or parchment paper). It might seem like the glue or paint isn’t sticking to the tulle, but we assure you, it is! Here’s the finished painted tulle and card stock spiral:

treated tulle and card stock Once the bottle, the shape, and the tulle are dry, gently wrap the tulle around the shape and tuck it into the bottle. Screw the lid on, write the name of your essence on a label, and attach the label to the bottle. We used 1.25″ price tags with elastic strings, found it the beading section at Michaels. We found the plastic baggies for the pigment there too. Both of these things cost just a few bucks.

You’re done! Charge up the bottle, take it to a dark room (or hold it next to a black light) and watch your creature essence illuminate! I love how the tulle makes the card stock shape look like it’s suspended in fog.

ewer unique essenceThere was another reason I was so keen to do a glow-in-the-dark project for The Creature Department. The book’s cover GLOWS IN THE DARK!

creature department book coverEvery story time, without fail, the kids would ask to see the cover glow. No matter how many times we looked, they never lost their enthusiasm for it. In the video below, you can’t  see the book, but you can definitely hear the kids reacting to its cover!