Summer Bucket List: Cucumber Boats

We spent a lovely Saturday afternoon sailing cucumber boats.

 Have you ever made one? They are so simple to make. Slice a cucumber length-wise and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Traditionally they are filled with flowers or other found natural items, but my kids decided to make their own sails out of wooden chopsticks and paper.

 You will also need a place to sail them. A stream is the ideal place.

 Once you have made your boats to your satisfaction, (and you can be as creative as you like)...

 just set them in the water and watch them float.

 Sometimes they will float away and you can't retrieve them.

 But other times, they get stuck on rocks or get washed ashore. If that happens, you can get them and set them sailing again.

 Sometimes you get to set them sailing again and again.

 It is fun each time you sail them. 

 You never know how the currents will take them. It is fun to see where they go each time.

You can also make them out of zucchini or other squash. It is a great use for squash when you have too many.

links:

• Discover and Explore at Fantastic Fun and Learning

Originally published Aug 5, 2012

Summer "Bucket" List: Play Pooh Sticks

"Then he dropped two in at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first; and one of them did; but as they were both thesame size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one. So the next time he dropped one big one and one little one, and the big one came out first, which was what hehad said it would do, and thelittle one came out last, which was what he had said it would do, so he had won twice. And that was the beginning of the game called Poohsticks." - A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, ch.6.

In the traditional version of Pooh Sticks, the participants each must drop a stick simultaneously on the upstream side of a bridge and run to the other side to see whose stick first appears on the other side of the bridge, and is the winner.

There is a Pooh Sticks Championship held every year in March at Day's Lock on the River Thames, England.

Originally posted Jul 22, 2012

Summer Bucket List: Operation Rescue Super Heroes

"The best laid plans..." of moving and taking our two week vacation being abruptly put on hold left us with an entirely different set of challenges. We spent the first week or so just adjusting to a new schedule of nursing care and physical therapy. Now that we are in a new rhythm, we are looking toward new plans for the rest of the summer...or at least for the next week. We are looking for simple summer activities for the boys that don't need a lot of supplies.

It is super simple thrifty fun.
It only requires gathering plastic super hero figures and a villain...

and then setting out the clues and figures in the right places.

You could adapt it to your children's own interests and they could rescue a princess or go on a spy mission. Just adjust the clues to reflect whatever idea you've come up with.

The clues even can be reading practice for the reluctant reader.

You should have seen how excited they were to follow the clues to the next destination.

For the end of the hunt, they found their heroes frozen in ice...

and they had wonderful fun playing with the ice, breaking their heroes out...

on a hot summer afternoon.

The outcome of the game?
The heroes were rescued...

and the villain was captured by the police.

originally posted 7/14/11

source: This idea comes entirely from I Am Momma -Hear Me Roar via On {the laundry} Line. 

Summer Bucket List: Zoom Ball

June 15, 2011

Zoom Ball is a fun summer toy you can make out of recycled materials (and you might throw in a little science while you are at it!)

You will need:

Two plastic soda bottles (preferably 1-liter, but all we had on hand was 2-liter, so that is what we used)

Two 12-foot lengths of string (we used much less, more like 6 feet)

Two plastic-ring, six-pack holders

Scissors

Masking tape

Cut the bottom off of two soda bottles.

Tape the ends of two bottles together to form a football shape.

Pull two strings through the bottle so that they come through both necks.

Cut a six-pack holder rings apart to form four, two-loop handles. (We needed to vary how long our ropes were depending on how large an arm span the kids had, so we didn't really use these and they aren't really needed.)

Partners hold the two handles on each end of the string. When the "ball" gets to you, you open your arms wide and the "ball" zooms away from you. As soon as it goes, you put your hands back together again so that your partner can send it back to you.

Renaissance: Role-playing History

My students all have enjoyed hands-on homeschooling, even in Middle School. As they get older, they tend to not want to make crafts, so what can you do to make your homeschool activities both more hands-on and yet age appropriate for the older students? We have been doing more and more role-playing games which are great for older students, multi age family groups or co-op groups. Any student from elementary to adult can play and learn. This year we have been role-playing historical events using the role-playing game, Renaissance.

What is a role-playing game?

Role-playing games give a structure to pretend play as players take on the roles of characters in a story and make decisions that determine the course of the story. One person takes on the job of the game master who helps the players by giving them the basic structure for the story and guides them through the consequences of their decisions. Dice are rolled to determine certain things, such as whether a character's aim is true with a rifle, or whether his resistance to disease is good or fair. These scenarios can last for a single game of a couple of hours or can be long plots that carry over from one playing session to another, for weeks at a time, much like a television show. The rulebook of the game, such as Renaissance,  has the directions for how to create a character, including a list of professions, factions (political and religious affiliations), skills to choose from and Era - specific equipment for the characters to buy. The rulebook also guides the game master and players through a simple system to determine combat outcomes as well as the outcomes of various circumstances such as weather, fatigue, thirst or falling, all based on percentages and dice rolls.

What about witchcraft and other such objectionable things in the game?

Role-playing games began with a fantasy setting and are often thought of as being steeped in concepts with objectionable themes such as witchcraft. Role-playing games are much like a smorgasbord, however, and it is the job of the game master to pick and choose what is appropriate based on his own and his players sensibilities and goals for the game. In the Renaissance rulebook, it explains rules of play that involves no magic, some mythological creatures or one that is all fantasy. For our purposes, since our game is purely an historic one, we have chosen a setting in which only real animals exist and there is no magic or alchemy. Even within these guidelines,  there is some choice. You can choose a setting involving an actual historical place and time, such as Renaissance Venice or you can choose a realistic "what if" set-up such as "an Elizabethan England conquered by the Spanish Armada" or "the colonization of Virginia in a world where the indigenous population of the Americas weren't decimated by European diseases. "

Is the time spent on it worth the educational value you get out of it?

There is little that is more engaging to students than a game. A game, by its nature, is fun. Your student, then, is likely to stick with a game a lot longer than learning the same information through reading or researching. This type of game also excites the imagination so that they begin to be able to picture the people, places and things of a particular period. Because they are also making decisions based on things that really happened to the people, the student begins to empathize with historical figures and make connections with the people of the past.  These things are not always possible by reading about historical figures and the dilemmas they faced.

So, what is it like to play?

For our first game, I chose, as the teacher and gamemaster, the historical story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia. I chose this because it was an actual historic event in which I could find enough documented material to add to my game, but also had enough of the unknown that my student -players could collaboratively write their own story without the problem of already knowing the plot.  I hope you will come back and join us as I will be writing a series of posts outlining how I used the Renaissance game, how we entertained history and story without sacrificing either and what we learned by playing the game.

The Royal Game of Ur

source

We have had a wonderful time learning, debating, supposing and playing the Ur Game. We were please by the set we got from Wood Expressions as it accurately replicates the actual ancient game boards found in Mesopotamia. The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, is the name given to several game boards found in the Royal Tombs of Ur. Excavated in Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the ancient Sumerian name of the game is not known. Examples of the Game of Twenty Squares date from about 3000 BC to the first millennium AD and are found widely from the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt to India. 

One of the two boards found by Sir Woolley is exhibited in the collections of the British Museum in London. The gaming pieces for this particular board did not survive, however some sets of gaming pieces of inlaid shale and shell were excavated at Ur with their boards. The boards appear to have been hollow with the pieces stored inside. Dice, either stick dice or tetrahedral in shape, were also found.

The rules of the game as it was played around 2500 BC are not known, and game historians do not agree as to how the game might have been played. Despite the fact that the early games show a variety of patterns on the board, the consistent factor is the five rosettes. Some boards that have been found only feature the rosettes and all boards seem to feature rosettes in similar patterns leading most people to suppose that only the rosettes are significant, but the nature of the rosettes is up for debate. They could be squares to be avoided - maybe they send the counter back to the start or forced a player to pay a fine into a central pool of betting money. Some have suggested that they are safe squares where a counter cannot be caught, but we agree with James Masters and think this is unlikely as the suggested tracks taken by the counters mean that some rosettes are in places that the opponent cannot reach so no need for safe squares. The third likely idea is that landing on a rosette gave the player an extra turn. We also noticed that the patterns of 5 and 4 are clearly in each of the patterns on the board, so we felt that the symbols were more than just decoration. Five squares each have flower rosettes, 'eyes', and circled dots. The remaining five squares have various designs of five dots. The rosettes also lie four squares apart from each other. We also noted that 5 x 4 equals 20, the same number as the total amount of squares; the Game of Twenty Squares. 

Sets of tokens or pawns were also found: seven white pawns with five black dots on each and seven black pawns with five white dots. The set also had with it two sets of three pyramid-shaped dice, although my reproduction had four instead.

This would be a roll of two.

These are simply binary lots (in that two of the four corners are marked with dots giving a 50-50 chance of getting a dotted side up)- throw three dice and count the number that land with a spotted corner upwards giving a number from 0 to 3 (or, in our case, throw four for a count of 0-4.)

Most versions of the rules people have come up with play the game as a race game, with the goal of introducing the seven pawns, moving them along your designated path, and to be the first to have all the pawns out of the game, similar to backgammon.

The basic rules are as such:

• Throw the dice to decide who plays first - highest score goes first, if it's a draw, throw again.

• Players take turns to throw the binary lots and move one of their pieces. 

• Only one piece may be moved per throw of the dice and pieces must always move forward around the track.

• If a counter lands upon a square occupied by an opposing counter, the counter landed upon is sent off the board and must start again from the beginning.

• If a counter lands on a rosette, throw the dice again (and again if another rosette is landed upon). The same piece need not be moved on the additional throw.

• Pieces can be moved onto the board at any stage of the game as long as the square that is moved to upon the first turn is vacant.

• A player must always move a counter if it is possible to do so but if it is not possible, the turn is lost.

• Exact throws are needed to bear pieces off the board.
  
  We found, however, that following the rule of sending someone back if you landed on them made the game interminably long, so we changed it to be that if you had another move to make that would not end up with you landing on another's piece, then you had to do that move first, but if the only move you could make resulted in landing on the other player's piece, then you moved there, and sent the other piece back to start.

The designated path is also up for debate. There are three generally recognized paths, but all three say that entry to the board is made into the outer row on the fourth square from the left going left. One player enters on the top row, the other on the lower. The path that we liked best says that when the counter reaches the corner (with the rosette), it moves to the middle row and travels along in the reverse direction. The most commonly used path matches the description of a game played on the same board found on a tablet dated 2 1/2 millennia later. When a counter reaches the final square of the middle row it returns to its starting row, goes one square back and then bears off. This makes a track of 14 squares, the 15th move being to bear off the board and players counters keep can only meet on the middle row. (More detailed descriptions of all three paths can be found at Master's Traditional Games.)

A cuneiform tablet of Babylonian origin that describes this game has recently been discovered by Irving Finkel, curator at the British Museum. The tablet dates from 177-176 BCE but it describes the main elements concerning the course of the game. (At that time people used knucklebones instead of pyramid-shaped dice.)

"The tablet shows the number and the names of the pawns, one of the dice (two knucklebones: one of sheep, one of ox), and a few details concerning the throws. It appears clearly that each of the five pawns owned by the players were different from one another and that a special throw was required to place each pawn at the beginning of the game. Among the twenty squares on the game board, five are generally decorated with a rosette and it seems that those squares are important in the course of the game. The tablet shows that those squares brought good luck, to place a pawn on them gave an advantage. If a pawn did not stop on a rosette, a penalty had to be paid. The scribe has described the fate of each pawn in a poetical way, the wins and the losses corresponding to the same efforts required to win enough food, drink and love." (Lhéte Jean Marie, "Histoire des jeux de société", 1994 Flammarion) 

A description of the movement of the pawns is unfortunately missing. The back of the tablet shows four by three squares with zodiac signs and messages of good and bad luck. Mr. Finkel supposes that this was a simple game and a way to foresee the future and the fate of the players. (Finkel Irving : "La tablette des régles du jeu royal d'Ur", Jouer dans l'Antiquité, cat. exp., Marseille, musée d'Archéologie méditerranéenne, 1991)

We all thought that these later rules brought up some interesting concepts that playing it like a simple race game seems to ignore. The rules that came with the game are a bit more difficult to understand, but seems to want to conform more closely to these suggestions. They say that the object of the game is to place four of your playing pieces on four identical square of any one of the three sets of five identical designs, plus one more of your playing pieces on one of the other squares of a different design. Once the pieces are placed on the board, players can move in any direction, jumping either color piece, but you must finish on an unoccupied space. Each time a player moves a playing piece, he must turn it over. A player cannot play this piece again until all of this playing pieces have been played. If you trap your opponent into a position where he cannot move, then the game is over and you win.

Another idea is that there were several versions of the game and different ways to play that were circulating at the same time.

One feature of my set that I have not seen anyone address is the sets of notches on the sides of the board. There are three sets of eleven notches, two sets of four notches and then one set of 3 and then 6 together. We thought perhaps they were used as a method of keeping score, but we couldn't think of how to implement this idea into the gaming. 

Quentin had an idea that perhaps there were originally some sort of cards with the game that fit in the areas where the board goes in, but we pointed out to him that they had clay tablets then, and not paper, so if there were some sort of tablet cards, they should have remained with the sets, and not disintegrated. It is still an interesting idea, however.

You can see that this simple game has brought up all sorts of interesting debate and conjecture, which has set them thinking in new ways...which is the best learning of all.

You can play The Royal Game of Ur online at The British Museum's Mesopotamia site or at Your Turn My Turn.

sources and inspiration:

• Wood Expression, Inc. rules to the Ur Game

• Masters Games: The Rules of The Royal Game of Ur

• British Museum: The Royal Game of Ur, The British Museum's Mesopotamia

• Trade Games Online Guide: Royal Game of Ur

• The Royal Game of Ur, Article by Catherine Soubeyrand

• Your Turn My Turn

Hnefatafl {a Viking Game}

We have been having fun playing with Steven's birthday present from me, a handmade Hnefatafl game.

This game was originally named "tafl", which was Old Norse for "table,""board," however, Hnefatafl became the preferred term for the game in Scandinavia by the end of the Viking Age, to distinguish it from other board games, such as Skáktafl (chess), Kvatrutafl (Tables) and Halatafl (Fox games), as these became known. The game spread everywhere the Vikings traveled, including Iceland, Britain, Ireland, and Lapland. Hnefatafl was mentioned in several of the medieval sagas.

Although the size of the board and the number of pieces varied, all games involved a 2:1 ratio of pieces, with the lesser side having a king-piece which starts in the center.  The king's objective is to escape to the board's periphery or corners, while the greater force's objective was to capture him. I found it interesting to learn that Linnaeus, the Swedish Botanist that gave us the Classification system, wrote down the first definitive rules of the game in 1732 from an expedition he took to Lapland. Around 1960 Milton Bradley published Swords and Shields, which was essentially the same game. We bought our version from the Etsy shop of Glapsvidur.

Rules for the game can be found at Hnefatafl-King's Table.

sources:

• Hnefatafl-the Strategic Board Game of the Vikings

Colonial Toys: Button Spinner

This simple colonial toy is made with just a button and a two-foot piece of string.

The larger buttons work best and the string needs to be thin enough to go through the button holes and not be too tight.You need a flat button (not a shank button) with at least two holes.

Thread the string through the holes in the button.

Tie the string ends together.

Keeping the button in the middle, spin the button to twist the strings.

Hold the ends of the string with your fingers pull the strings to let them begin to untwist.

Release the pressure and then pull the string taut again to keep it spinning.