Thanks for the great blog. My kids and I love the Kingdom Keeper series. I'll have to look for the B

Kristin Ford is a freelance writer who lives in Orlando. She wrote about The Walt Disney Co. during many of her 17 years as a journalist at the Orlando Sentinel, before joining the AllEars.Net staff. Kristin writes about Disney news from a parent's perspective, covering Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Disney Channel, Disney Publishing and Disney Interactive and more. You can follow her adventures through the parks with her husband and two elementary-school-age children here and on Twitter @Kristin_B_Ford.
This weekend, my 10-year-old son set out to be a Kingdom Keeper at the Magic Kingdom using the self-guided quest in Birnbaum Guides 2013 Walt Disney World edition. We didn't encounter any villains, bus tours from portland maine but we did have fun with a new challenge in a favorite theme park.
For those not familiar with the term "Kingdom Keepers," it comes from a popular series of books by the same name from author Ridley Pearson. The Kingdom Keepers are students who protect the theme park from Disney villains, known as Overtakers in the books.
In 2011, Disney Youth Education Series (YES) launched the first Kingdom Keepers Quest, a self-guided tour that Pearson helped design to create an immersive experience for the series' fans at Magic Kingdom. Because that program also has educational components -- such as building skills in problem solving, bus tours from portland maine creativity, language arts, mathematics and critical thinking -- it is offered to groups of students.
Fans who weren't visiting the Magic Kingdom with their schools, though, were disappointed and had no such opportunity bus tours from portland maine -- until this year's Birnbaum Guide was published. So, what can fans like my son expect from the individual self-guided quest?
"[The quests] are all me, so they're the same feel," Pearson told me recently. "I think that because of space limitations, they're certainly truncated. … They may be a little more difficult in YES, but those take 3 to 4 hours, and this one takes, maybe, an hour and a half."
Don't be fooled, though. Birnbaum's Kingdom Keepers Quest is not simple -- at least not for a fourth-grader and his mother. We didn't have any difficulty finding the various locations in Magic Kingdom that the clues describe, but some of the codes and word play took multiple readings to decipher. This was especially true of the first quest in the set of five. Fortunately, you can solve the quests bus tours from portland maine in any order and then put the clues together for the final answer, so we did skip the first one and save it for the end.
Embedded in each quest are passages from "Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark," the first book in the series, which hint at some of the answers. And, if you have a smartphone and download an app, there are extra goodies you can unlock in the Magic Kingdom to help entertain and guide you through the quests. I don't want to give those surprises away, but the ones we saw were pretty darn cool. Plus, smartphone users can tackle an additional Expert bus tours from portland maine Challenge Quest.
Can't get enough Kingdom Keepers? You're in luck. Disney Youth Education Series currently is testing a new quest for school bus tours from portland maine groups at Animal Kingdom that will launch soon. Individual fans will get their own Animal bus tours from portland maine Kingdom quest in the 2014 Birnbaum bus tours from portland maine Guides for Walt Disney World, which will be released this fall.
"I'm just finishing now a new [Birnbaum quest] bus tours from portland maine for 2014 that is four pages of Magic Kingdom and four pages of Animal bus tours from portland maine Kingdom," Pearson told me. "I think we'll build that out as the years go forward."
In the meantime, fans can meet Pearson this week when he appears at Walt Disney bus tours from portland maine World to sign copies of the latest book in the series, "Kingdom Keepers 6: Dark Passage," which was released April 2. For details on these events and more about what's in store in the next Kingdom Keepers books, please see my earlier blog post .
Thanks for the great blog. My kids and I love the Kingdom Keeper series. I'll have to look for the Birnbaum book for our next trip. I hope they make this series into movies someday soon. Am I the only one who invisions Dick Van Dyke as Wayne while reading the books? I think he'd he great in that role.