A brown paper-wrapped book with stickers

The Children’s Services Department has wrapped up another successful year of Story Sleuths, a kids’ book club with a unique twist. Rather than everyone reading the same book, the kids get to “blindly” choose their title from a selection of wrapped books. Similar to the “blind date with a book” trend, the wrapped books have basic information, such as topic phrases, page count and format. All the books selected for an upcoming session have something in common, and it is up to the kids to figure out what that is!

Story Sleuths meet once a month on Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. Children in grades 4–5 are encouraged to register online:

Story Sleuth sessions begin with each child sharing details of their book, then they try to guess the common theme between all the books. Just like a mystery detective, each child is encouraged to listen carefully for clues and patterns in all the books that are shared.

After everyone has shared, the kids dive into their final clue: an activity based around the mysterious theme. For example, when the theme was Secret Organizations, the kids worked together to solve and follow puzzles hidden around the library. By the end, they had uncovered the secret organization N.O.V.E.L., which stands for the “Network Of Vaguely Eccentric Librarians.”

After the activity, the sleuths confer and make one final guess at the theme. If they guess right, they each get to choose two unique stickers that represent the theme. If they guess wrong, they only get to choose one sticker to keep. We end each week by decorating our reading journals with our new stickers and choosing a new mystery book for next time.

As we enter our third year as a club, check out some highlighted titles from our past year of themes!

Please contact Christina McCormack at cmccormack@fountaindale.org or 630.685.4163 with any questions.