Being an adult can be expensive — with taxes, bills and groceries piling up on one another — and it seems like everyday necessities keep getting pricier and pricier. With all of this in mind, unwinding and having a good time should not be an extra strain on your wallet.
For a free and informative activity, book some time for the Women’s History Month Scavenger Hunt at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library.
The library’s Eden Park Branch manager Kallan Jackson said that she and her team saw the demand and wanted to give adults something to do free of charge.
“There’s not a lot of free activities for adults to do, and I just turned 30 last year,” Jackson said. “Plenty of adults still have a sense of adventure, a sense for playing games and things like that, so this is a way to tap into that as well.”
Around last February is when these library scavenger hunts began, with one themed after Black History Month. That hunt got so much traction that the team decided to bring the scavenger hunts back each month with distinctive themes.
Jackson said they did not want to go the usual route of riddles for hints, though. The hints each month are uniquely tailored to the theme and to help hunters explore the library.
“For May last year, we did flowers — it was May flowers. We cut out pictures of flowers and we hid them in our collection,” said Jackson. “From our point of view, it’s good because it gets people familiar with the different sections of the collection, and from theirs, it’s fun because they get to look on the different shelves.”
This month is different in particular because they turned the scavenger hunt into a bingo game. Hunters can browse the shelves of the library trying to find books that fit squares on their card to fill out a row, column or diagonal line.
Once participants fill out one of those, they can bring the books up to the front in a cart and claim their prize. Hunters can win a number of different things, Jackson said, but the biggest prize is only available while supplies last.
“This month, it’s been tote bags that have been pretty popular. We used to have a box full of random things — you know, pins, cups, hand sanitizer, things like that. But we’ve been doing the canvas bags, and they’ve been very popular,” said Jackson.
The Women’s History Month Scavenger Hunt is ongoing until the end of the month. However, if somehow you cannot make it before March 31, do not fear. East Baton Rouge Parish Library is already gearing up April’s theme with poetry, inspired by the library’s One Book One Community program.
“Every year, we take one book to focus on, and people in the community can read the book and attend programming inspired by the book,” explained Jackson. “This year the book is called “You Are Here, Poetry in the Wild” by Ada Limon. So we’ve had a lot of programs dealing with that system-wide, and that’s what our scavenger hunt next month will be.”
For hours and updates on the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s scavenger hunts, check out their website.
