3.29.2013

Family Program / Percy Jackson Book Party

One of the more challenging programs that I created earlier this year was a Percy Jackson book party. This book series (as well as the others by Rick Riordan!) is always a popular choice with our 4th and 5th graders.  I've only actually read the first book in the series, The Lightning Thief, but that was enough to pull out major themes and events to base activities off of for our event.





To begin the party, we read a selection from the first chapter of The Lightning Thief.  Each kid then got to spin a Twister-like spinner split into sections to decide which Camp Half Blood cabin they belonged to.  In the book each cabin belongs to a different Greek god or goddess and I picked out 4 of the major cabins (Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and Ares) to use.  I made up simple stickers with the names of the cabins for the kids to wear once they spun.  The other activities we did are listed below - campers get a bead on a necklace for each year of camp completed in the book series, but we made bracelets instead with plastic lacing.  Pin the Eye on the Cyclops is pretty self explanatory and the Greek mythology guessing game I made up is just pictures of the deities that kids had to match up with their names.  The scavenger hunt was the hit of the party - kids had to look for pictures of items that were significant in the book series which were hidden around the Children's Room.  These included Poseidon's triton, Zeus's lightning bolt, the Golden Fleece, Athena's owl and the Roman Eagle standard.







If you're thinking about planning a Percy Jackson book party, check out the links in the paragraph above or the links below for PDFs of the resources I created for our book party.  Feel free to download and print them or use them as inspiration for your own event!  These websites were also incredibly helpful to me:

percyjacksonbooks.com (all of the images used in the resources I created are from this website)

PDFs:
Scavenger hunt bookmark lists
Greek gods & goddesses matching game
Camp Half Blood stickers & scavenger hunt items

I hope this inspires you to create your own book party - the resources are free for you to use, but if you do use them, credit is appreciated! :)  Enjoy!

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