bloomingblog: BIG Bananagrams

My oldest daughter works at a prepschool in NH, known as Kimball Union Academy, www.kua.org, where she's in charge of the student activities. Smart girl that she is, she knows exactly where to turn for help in building crazy things. Mom and Dad :)

Because she was tasked with getting the school year off with a bang! (literally - this picture was taken right after my husband blew the cannon!) she created a whole day centered around giant games for an oversized field day and part of year-long competitions known as the Tower Cup.

The question is always posed by one of my three kids, "Do you think you could do/build/cook/sew...?" to which I'll always say "yes"! So, for this year's start of the Tower Cup, I was asked to build BIG Bananagrams, giant Jenga and oversized Kerplunk. (I will do a post on Jenga and Kerplunk soon :) )

So, off to Home Depot I went to buy some luan plywood and then asked the nice man (I felt bad because he didn't know what he was saying "yes" to) to cut 144 12" x 12" "tiles" from the sheets. Also at the store, I bought some stencils along with professional Sharpies. I don't know what makes these Sharpies "professional" other than the tip was pretty broad and maybe there was more ink in the pen.

When I got home, I sanded the edges so no one would get any splinters and then set up my workstation. Don't you love how high-tech I am with my old iPod in my cup? When you plop it in the cup, the whole set-up works like a speaker. Cool little factoid my kids had to teach me.

I centered the stencil on the tile using my fave 3M blue painters tape and was off and running!

Only 143 more to go!

If you want to make these at home, here is the breakdown of how many of each letter you'll need:

2: J, K, Q, X, Z
3: B, C, F, H, M, P, V, W, Y
4: G
5: L
6: D, S, U
8: N
9: T, R
11: O
12: I
13: A
18: E

Don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to hand letter these things, but with some Diet Coke, (or wine or yummy cocktails) it didn't seem so bad.

It kept me motivated seeing them lined up in my hall as I went along

After building these games, I found some great hockey bags and printed out pictures of the type of game along with a set of rules

After the ceremonial start finished with a BANG! from our cannon,

the games were set up on the campus.

Bananagrams look great on a field hockey field, don't they?

If you don't remember how to play, you have to scramble to get tiles and then try to make as many words as you can. You can find the rules online in case you don't want to go buy yourself a game, but you should! It's really fun!