Candyland! The game of nostalgia and childhood! As much fun as it is to play it as a board game with small game pieces, for the past two years, we gave our community an opportunity to experience this game on a whole new level by building sets out of cardboard to make the board game life-size!

How it happened: Last summer I had over 20 teens hanging out at the library and they asked if there were projects they could help me with. I was not planning on having this many great helpers, and I scrambled every week to find helpful things they could do that they were also interested in. Until, one of them asked if they they could build the sets to Candyland, thinking of how much fun it would be to play the game if it was life-size. Boom! The large project I needed! Teens worked for about 6 weeks to build all the sets, and many of the sets were worked on by several teens coming into the library separately, so there was lots of collaboration. We used lots of cardboard, construction paper, and paint!

We set the game up in our programming room by using just plain construction paper to create the “path” that the kids walked on. Teens also created four dice using square boxes that kids rolled to let them know what colored square to move to. This summer, I had four teens on hand to help run the game, so I gave a dice to each of our four teen volunteers and they would bring a family, or group, of kids through the game. The kids would throw the dice, and the volunteer would retrieve it, and then pass it to the next player. That way the kids never had to leave their square. Also, having four volunteers meant that we could have four groups playing the game at one time. We could accommodate a large crowd this way and no kids had very long to wait as a volunteer would finish their game every few minutes, and then go back to the starting square to pick up their next group of kids who wanted to play.

Music is such a powerful force to set a welcoming tone, and I had Laurie Berkner’s “Shake Your Body Down” song on repeat while families played their way through Candyland. Another song that would also be great is the Lollipop Song.

Here are our sets:

Plum Tree

Mr. Mint 

Gumdrop Pass (made from a tablecloth and sand pails)

Grandma Nut’s House

Princess Lolly

Queen Frostine 

Gloppy 

King Candy’s Castle 

And, that’s Candyland! We saved the sets and the paper squares that kids used as the “path” so this is a FREE program once you have it set-up and you can run it as many times as your community needs! In 2018, we offered this twice during our summer reading program, once on a Monday night and again on a Tuesday morning, taking advantage of the opportunity to only have one set-up and one take-down for two huge programs!

Have you create life-size games at your library? I would love to hear about it!