A #Libday8 Tale of Espionage, Villiany, and Happy Feet

Wednesdays in February I decided to hold camps/classes based on the Ologies series. My first -ology was Spyology. Seventeen school-age attendees learned about all things Spy-related. For effect, the Agent Cody Banks soundtrack was played in the background.




When the kids arrived, I made nametags for them. "Agent" was written on about 20 to facilitate the process. I used their first name initial, and once there was already, for instance, an "Agent A", there couldn't be another one, so I asked for their favorite color. (Agent Black, I hear from her superiors [read: mother], decided to laminate hers and wear it with twine as a necklace).

We went over the "Spy Rules" as laid out by "Agent K", the "author" of Spyology. We focused on 4 of the 11 rules for the rest of the 45 minute program, which played out in stations:

The Spymaster is Always Right: I did this one for two reasons: 1) I'm a cheeseball who wanted her own nametag with "Spymaster" on it, and 2) because I love wielding absolute malevolent power over children at all times. We simply talked about how I'm the one to listen to, and that was that.

All the sweet, sweet loot

Stand Out... to Blend In: I wanted to make disguises, but all I could find in the Mask Decorating genre in our basement were some extra Happy Feet masks. Surprisingly enough (or maybe not), the kids didn't even care and covered these masks with felt, pipe cleaners, ribbons, and feathers [read: scraps I found in the story room] to their heart's content.

Keep Secrets Safe-- Encode!: The sixth rule was scrambled, and the kids had to decode it-- luckily enough, it wasn't an ad for Ovaltine but a rule about encoding everything you write. The kids got to take home the code so they could write their own.

If You Haven't Got It, Fake It!: I used this spy rule to create a station that had a large number of nonfiction and chapter books about spying and detective work (including The Strange Case of Origami Yoda and The Fourth Stall) for kids to check out. They also could take home from this station "evidence tags" [read: leftover laptop check out tags from 2000, and pipe cleaners] to use as bookmarks.


After they were finished with every station, the kids came up to me and I issued them a "certificate of super-spying" [read: WordDoc template] on which I wrote each agent's name.

All in all, and extremely inexpensive program , about 2 hrs of prep time, and a whole lot of fun!

[Next week: pirateology!]