Life-Size Candyland

The kids have the day off of school, so we decided to take advantage and offer Life-Size Candyland at the library. It was absolutely crazy, but the kids had a great time! We found this idea from the ALSC blog and from a website called Recreation Guy.  And what we couldn’t find online, we made up ourselves! 

Game Creation

We have an amazing artist on staff during the summer and she created posters of each of the characters on the board – absolutely beautiful and look exactly like the characters from the board game.  We actually mapped out a plan for our large meeting room and used cardstock to put down the board game using a masking tape bubble to keep it in place.  This could have been done on the fly, but it was nice having a plan to follow to create a pretty extensive board.  Then we created game kits – a Ziploc bag with a spinner and character cards for each team.

Where we could have really used the help was helping each team use the spinner and advance through the game.  We ended up with about 20 kids and created 5 teams of 4 kids each.  Then it was up to us (and a few wonderful moms) to help the kids by running the spinner as each child took their turn.  In hindsight, it would have been great to give each of the groups a color-coded card with a number indicating when they were to spin – this would have prevented a lot of confusion.  And additional helpers to be assigned to each team to be in charge of the spinner and character cards.  As you can see from our game board, we actually had our Life-Size Clue game taped down underneath since the programs happened almost back-to-back. 

Overview

Overall, the kids had a great time and I was surprised with how long they were willing to play.  We had the rule that if they got a character card that they had already passed, they had to go back to that game space.  We played for at least 45 minutes and many could have played some more.  And most of our game board spaces held up! We’ll be saving those for another round in the future.  In the end, having staggered starting times and helpers would have made this much more seamless. But, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and that’s what is most important!