Wimpy Kid Book Release Party

This month The Third Wheel, the 7th book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, or what will be asked for by children and parents at the question desk as the brown book, hit the shelves. To celebrate at our library, we had a book release party for tweens. Last year, for the release of Cabin Fever, we had a local comic book artist come and do a class with the kids, which was great, but this year I wanted to do a full on party complete with games, prizes, food and crafts.

I came across a very helpful resource online to plan the games portion of the party, an event kit for Dog Days, the 4th book. I went ahead and used three of the games after slightly modifying them. 

Every kid received a raffle ticket and a name tag with a Wimpy Kid character placed on their back upon arriving.  The Name Tag Game was a great ice breaker. Kids had to guess their character’s name by asking others questions about their character.  

The initial group game we played to get the kids warmed up was Cheese Touch.  Our version of this was much like Hot Potato. I pulled two yellow bean bags from our children’s storytime supplies and used these as the cheese touch. All the kids sat in a circle and passed around the cheese touch while I played music. Every time I stopped the music, the kids all screamed and laughed and whoever had a bean bag got out of the circle.  The winner of the game received The Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book.

After, we divided the kids up into four teams and had two rounds of the "Wimpy Kid" Trivia and Secret Word Game, which was very much like Taboo and pushed the kids to overcome shyness and think outside the box. We had over forty kids so it was a little crazy at times but a lot of fun. Luckily, I had staff and teen volunteers helping out. I was impressed by how many of the kids remembered such specific details from the books. Instead of giving a prize for winning, everyone on the team received raffle tickets for every point or question answered correctly.

For food I decided to go with school lunch type of snacks, including string cheese, juice boxes, goldfish crackers, cookies, fruit snacks and fruit roll ups. They disappeared in no time at all.

We raffled off prizes that included a few of the old Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, Wimpy Kid 2013 calendars with Jeff Kinney’s autograph that library staff had picked up at ALA Annual, book lights, and copies of The Third Wheel. The raffle was quite an event because due to the games the kids had multiple raffle tickets to consult every time a winner was picked. Plus, no kid left empty handed   Every attendee received a free kid’s meal coupon to a nearby restaurant.

We finished the party by decorating journals. Each kid received a composition notebook and in the middle of each table was a mix of markers, stickers, scissors, glue, magazines, fabric and construction paper so they could get creative and use all kinds of mediums to personalize their covers.

I’m looking forward to the next installment in this series that gets so many kids reading, into the library and excited about books!