Thursday, December 3, 2009

Your Light Has Come!

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
See the darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the LORD rises upon you
and his glory appears upon you.
Isaiah 60:1-2

Advent activity Day 2- "Go to the Cool Bean Cafe for peppermint hot chocolate, and play Christmas Speed Scrabble!"

If you are ever in our neck of the woods (Oakhurst, Ca. If you visit Yosemite National Park, you'll likely drive through our neck of the woods, "The Gateway to Yosemite" to get there) and your wanting a GREAT cup of java, make sure you stop by the Cool Bean Cafe.

The Cool Bean Cafe is owned by the sweetest newlywed couple EVER! You will be BLESSED by their inviting personalities, and their love and desire for this community. In addition they offer DELICIOUS fair trade coffee (the Gingersnap Latte is my personal favorite). cb collage

And are you asking, "what is Speed Scrabble?" It is the funnest (it's a word) game EVER!scrabblecollage
What you need:
Scrabble pieces from 2 or more games (i place a matching mark on the back of set pieces, so i can return them to the original Scrabble game as needed).
How to play:
Dump Scrabble pieces on table, flip them with letters facing down
Each player takes 7 pieces
Flip pieces and create a crossword puzzle with all the letters
The first player to use all pieces says, "take 2." All players grab 2 letters from the pile, and continue to build the cross word puzzle.
This process continues until the pile is depleted.
When the last player has successfully built their crossword puzzle using all the pieces, and their are no more pieces on the table to be taken, he/she counts down to 10, allowing the remainder of the players to time to try to complete their crossword puzzle.
When the counting is over the game is over.
DO NOT UNDO YOUR CROSSWORD PUZZLE!
Players count their points by counting the numbers on Scrabble pieces. Letters that are used in multiple words get multiple points.
Unused Scrabble pieces count against the points you accumulated.
The player to go out first automatically gets 50 points added to their points.
The player with the most points is the winner!
For Christmas Speed Scrabble we made a rule that each player with any Christmas word, received an additional 50 points for each word!

The kids and I enjoyed our time together, away from homeschool (shhhh, don't tell them they were working on their spelling as we played) and our normal responsibilities. We enjoyed sipping on cocoa and playing together.

9 comments:

  1. How fun! I can't wait until my kids are older so that we can play speed scrabble too! And I wish I was passing through your neck of the woods...but alas I'm stuck up here in the frozen north :(

    Oh, and I loved your last post too! We do the "Secret Santa" thing every year. We had it done to us when we were kids the year my mom died. I can remember how exciting it was to get up those 12 days and see what was left on our doorstep.
    I get just as much excitement doing it for others now, especially because I know what it did for our family that year.

    Bless you as you give this Christmas!

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  2. The coffee shop looks great, but then coffee always looks (smells, tastes) great to me!

    Can you believe that I've never even played regular Scrabble? I'm thinking I need to make my husband play a little Speed Srabble with me soon. Thanks for the idea.

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  3. I've just found my way over here, finally, after seeing a comment from you on my blog. I have to say, your are stinkin' ADORABLE, and I can't wait to read more of your posts. =)

    Blessings,

    Monica

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  4. i finally got the directions on speed scrabble! morgan would love it... the other two are to little yet. so fun!

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  5. Great post, Denise! I would love to visit a coffee shop that embraces Speed Scrabble!

    Did you know, you can play Speed Scrabble online? It's pretty fun :)

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  6. i think we talked about alyssa being david's 1:1 aide last year in school. we love her sooo much. i sobbed when i said goodbye. i hope we get to visit their coffee shop!

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  7. So I'm catching up on about 160 of your posts that I've missed in the past year and came across this one. Did you know you can buy a game called Bananagrams and it is Speed Scrabble! It has all the directions and all the pieces come in a little banana shaped bag perfect for road trips or trips to sweet coffee shops.

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  8. I've played a game very similar to Speed Scrabble... Called "Pick" - used tiles from just one game, same instructions on how to play except instead of saying take 2, you say pick. Time is up as soon as the first person uses all their tiles. For points we just count up the value of the leftover tiles each person has, so the goal is to get the lowest score. Loads of fun!!!

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