Our Hunger Games Party

So the weekend The Hunger Games movie opened, the Hayden Library held a Hunger Games party, and it was AWESOME! Turns out that I've had a lot to write about on my blog, so it took me this long to type up what we did.

As the teens arrived I had each one of them look up their Hunger Name. Basically the website randomly gives you a crazy name, what district you were from, when you participated in the Hunger Games, and how you died. It was a fun way to break the ice.

We then entered our training portion of the evening, which consisted of three stations. The points you received from these stations were added to the points your team got from the Cornucopia Challenge (chatting about that in a minute), and that determined how many times your name went into the drawing for the two movie tickets at the end of the night.

One station was archery (a plastic bow I bought from Fred Meyer), another station was javelin throwing (a pool noodle works really well), and our last station was getting across a pit of boiling goo (doesn't necessarily happen in the Hunger Games but I thought the game makers might have come up with something similar. Basically, you had to get from point A to point B without a part of you touching the floor. All that could touch the floor were two cardboard boxes. Some teens used them as stepping stones, while others shimmied their way across the floor).

In addition to the training portion, we also had provisions and creativity exercises. Our provisions consisted of frosted doughnut holes, which reminded us of the Capitol, and beef jerky, water, and trail mix which reminded us of the arena.

We had two creativity exercises. Katniss's mockingjay pin becomes a symbol of the rebellion, so we figured we would make some. We used Shrinky Dinks paper to trace a picture of the mockingjay, threw them in the oven, and they shrunk to hard medallions that were pretty cool. I purchased the Shrinky Dinks paper at my local Michaels.

Our other creativity exercise was making a Paracord Survial Bracelet. Now I couldn't find slide release buckles, so I made a couple knots instead of the male end of the clasp, and made a simple loop where the female end of the clasp was. I bought the paracord at Black Sheep Sporting Goods, and brought a small lighter from my house to burn the ends of the rope so it wouldn't unravel.

Once we had tested our creativity, battle readiness, and had some provisions, we were ready for our Cornucopia Challenge. Our participants were divided into teams with a huge pile of supplies in the center of a room. At the buzzer, one team member grabbed one item, brought it back to their team, then the next player took off to grab something else. Once the Cornucopia was pillaged, a script was read. If you had the right stuff for the script, you got points, and if you didn't, well, you didn't.

After the Cornucopia, the only thing left to do was tally the points, figure out how many names each participant got to put into our drawing (we did 1 name for each 100 points), and then we drew to see who got the movie tickets.

Our teens left with a medallion, the start of a survival bracelet (turns out they take some time to make), and memories of a great evening. If you haven't done one yet, I would highly suggest it for this movie, or when Catching Fire comes out :)