The Sinister Scribe

Today Sam and I started working on days of the week in Japanese. We even made sound file (WMA) of the English days of the week song using the Japanese words. It takes the equivalent of 2 verses to get all the syllables in but it works… kinda. I’m desperately searching for ways to jump start our learning. Just feels rather stagnant lately.

This picture is of a filefolder game I made for the basic hiragana characters. The characters are on the top of the flap and the romaji is shown when you lift it. I made an oops doing “me” twice but I’ve fixed that in the PDF file here and added spaces between the columns. The black lines show where you cut. I’ll be doing another one where the symbols aren’t so organized to make it a little more challenging. Maybe someone else will find them useful too.

We have some other hiragana learning games in mind: solitaire (match hiragana symbol to romaji), go fish (pairs of hiragana, no romaji)… hmmm… seems there was something else. Anyway. I’ll post those when we’ve done them.

I’ve bearching for some frugal ways to augment our history lessons by playing games that people would have played then. I found some great resources:

• Egyptian Life: an online Senet game
  http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/life/activity/main.html
• Nine Man Morris: printable game board
  http://www.themathlab.com/games/Nine%20Man%20Morris/nineman.htm
• Royal Game of UR: freeware version to play on your computer
  http://www.xmission.com/~psneeley/Shareware/ur.htm
• Bryanna’s Treasure Box: inexpensive versions of medieval and early games
  http://www.bryannastreasurebox.com/

For Nine Man Morris, I think I’ll print out a paper game board and have Sam make clay game pieces. The others can be played online. If he really likes the paper/online games, I’ll make cloth “boards” later. We do have a nice wooden version of UR to which I understand Senet is related. Need to get that one back out!

Later…

Ooh! Maybe I will make a cloth board now. Look at these.