‘Tis the season to be jolly and Botetourt County Libraries has just the thing to get the entire family into the spirit of the holidays. Your presents is requested in our new Holiday Fun Reading Challenge. We have activities and games that are sure to put a smile on any Grinch’s face.
As with past challenges we have offered during the year, our Holiday Fun Reading Challenge is available through Beanstack (botetourtva.beanstack.org) and offers participants a chance to earn holiday themed digital badges. Listening to audiobooks, reading magazines, newspapers and any type of book will help you reach the five-hour goal for the month.
For extra fun, we created a list of some of our favorite holiday books for children, teens and adults. They range from classics such as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss, to some of our new favorites like Santa Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins and Skipping Christmas by John Grisham.
But wait…. there’s myrrh! We also have activities available that will earn participants more badges as well as points when completed. Each activity is worth 1-10 points, depending on difficulty. The reader with the most points at the end of our challenge will win a holiday gift basket filled with books, puzzles, movies and gift cards from businesses like Barnes and Noble and Town Center Tap House.
These activities are sure to make you Santa-mental while you complete tasks in the Holiday Countdown and Holiday Games badge like sharing a cup of cocoa with a friend or watching a holiday movie after baking some cookies. The Christmas Tree Hunt MadLib will have you and your family laughing as you create the next Christmas classic.
No holiday season would be complete without a lot of boxes. And we know just what to do with them. Build something and enter our DIY Box Challenge! We want to see what your creative minds come up with this year. Just for entering, you will earn 10 points in our Holiday Fun Reading Challenge. All the details can be found on our website (bocolibraries.info) and on Beanstack (botetourtva.beanstack.org).
One thing you will continually notice about our challenges is that while we promote reading and having fun, we also encourage being kind and being a good citizen. We hope our participants will branch out with our Do Good, Feel Good activity which gets participants out in the community spreading holiday cheer by paying it forward and volunteering. We know that the tiniest gesture could be the biggest treasure in someone’s day and we want to do our part to inspire this every day.
Whether you are young or old, we have something in our Holiday Reading Challenge to keep everyone in good spirits this holiday season. If you don’t already have an account, be sure to create one at botetourtva.beanstack.org today. Yule be sorry if you don’t participate this holiday season!
By Jaime Duval
Botetourt Public Libraries