Fun Friday Program – Secret Codes

The school year has begun and our Fun Friday program is back and in high demand!  We had 25 kids register with 14 more on a waiting list.  If you’ve missed some of my previous posts, our school district gives the kids a half day on the second Friday of the month in order to give grade-level teachers time to meet.  We picked up on this idea and have begun offering a program for children in grades 1 – 4 from 2:00 – 2:45pm on these Fridays.  This month’s theme was secret codes!

We began by discussing codes of all times – stop lights, text messages, languages, DNA, Morse code and more!  A great book that helped me with this part was called Code Breakers: From Hieroglyphs to Hackers by Simon Adams.  Then I read a rhyming story called Detective Small in the Amazing Banana Caper by Won Herbert Yee.

After our story we moved on to the fun part of our program – secret codes!  We first wrote on plain white paper with lemon juice using a q tip.  The kids had a great time decorating their paper.  As a side note – I looked up about 15 different recipes and many said a light bulb would change the ink, but the only think I found to work was a hot iron!

While the kids lemon juice “invisible ink” was drying, we worked on three other different codes they kids could use with their friends.  We learned how to create a reverse alphabet code, a grid code, and a pigpen code.  I found these codes online, and then created simple worksheets for the kids to work with.  I also gave each code a practice word for the kids to decipher.  Some of the codes were easier than others and with a wide age-range it was difficult for the whole group to stay together.  Each code had directions, but of course the kids didn’t read the directions, they just kept calling my name.

Overall, I think it was a great program, I wish we would have had a little more time with each code, but the older kids moved far faster than the first and second graders.  But, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the idea of writing a note like a secret spy agent!