For our last Challenge Board, the kids made fairy houses for Saint Patrick's Day. But they made them a little early, and everyone knows that you can only catch a leprechaun on March 17th. But, oh, what's this?! The kids checked the houses early that morning and found new friends, along with the traditional fairy-sized horde of candy.
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| Middle child attracted a gnome, a being who appreciates good construction and forethought. He is riding a turtle. |
Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code
Coded Message Activity
We used a simple substitution code and talked about deductions and proof by contradiction. Each message contained predictable or common phrases to help with decoding ("My name is"), and if we had encoded the entire letter, "Dear" and "Sincerely" could also have worked as cues. Each letter also held a seed for what to write back. For example, one letter asked the student to help name a pet dragon.
Tips for printing:
- Use a font where capital "i" and lowercase L look different, or chose to make them all lowercase.
- Use a large font with double spacing or 2.5 spacing, and increase the space between letters (the kerning). I reprinted mine bigger than shown.
- Leave space on the top or bottom for notes (A=z, etc.)
- If students want to work together, use the same code for each personal message. If they do not, use different codes. I ended up printing a new code for the kid who was determined to solve it himself, so overhearing answers wouldn't throw him.
- Keep a copy of the solutions.
Hints for solving a simple substitution code:
- How many single-letter words are there in the English language? Words with apostrophes? Two-letter words?
- It is okay to guess and wrong. You will be able to tell that you got a letter wrong once you have an impossible word or a phrase that does not make sense.
- The more you solve, the easier it is to solve more by reading what is there and guessing missing words.
- If you have trouble towards the end, check which letters you have solved and try out the ones left.
Encode your return letter by hand:
For beginners, you can write out the alphabet and "slide" the alphabet so that, for example, A becomes B, B becomes C. My own codes were random, and one was the alphabet backwards, so if o=l then l = o as well.
For learning about more complicated codes, we love Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing by Martin Gardner. My oldest is planning to encode his using a wheel cipher. Break the Code by Bud Johnson includes codes for students to break to practice their newfound skills.
Suncatchers
Items needed: Clear contact paper, tissue paper in many colors, construction paper, hole punch, yarn, marker, scissors.
Prep
- Draw a simple shape on your sheet of paper. Cut it out, leaving an intact paper border. (Don't cut through your border to get to the middle). The paper border helps keep the contact paper from curling.
- Cut 2 pieces of contact paper to almost the same size as your sheet of paper. They must be bigger than your cutout, but may be easier to place later if they're a little smaller than your paper.
- Peel off the backing from one contact piece, leaving the contact paper sticky-side up. Place your paper border over your contact paper. The paper border should have a "window" that is now filled by contact paper. Replace the backing over the contact paper until your student is ready to begin.
- (Remove the backing.) Students cut strips of colored tissue paper and tear off pieces to fill the "window." You can prep the tissue paper pieces ahead of time for younger children.
- Once the window is filled and ready, peel the backing off from the second piece of contact paper and lay it sticky-side down, creating a final protective layer.
- Hole punch and hang with string. You can also cut the string ahead of time, hole punch ahead of time, etc., but I like to let older students chose their string color and do some of this themselves.
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