Gifts for English Major Me

In all my crazy days of shopping (mostly online) for Christmas, I made sure I picked up a couple of items for me.  My selections appealed to the English Major in me, and both items were new to me so kind of exciting. 

Haikubes

This is a collection of little cubes, with a variety of words written on the sides.  I was so excited when I found this, I bought one for my friend Iris, too.  We played with the Haikubes a little bit when she was here, but there are some things that we had issues with.  I border on being a haiku purest, which means that the poem is written to define a moment as it is, without metaphor.  It is supposed to focus on nature.  Haikubes makes no qualms about being about anything -- a haiku can even be a rant, in their estimation. So that means a lot of words are included which may not fit into a haiku purest's vision. 

The cubes themselves have a wonderful feeling to them, and they are kind of fun to shuffle around.  I have decided the best thing to do is to find a couple of word that go together, that sound good, and then build the rest of the haiku (term used lightly) after that.  Today I wrote this one:

precious time whispers

for any fertile fortune

promises return

Yeah, it's about my last day of break.  A bit abstract, right?  It's a 17 syllable poem. We'll leave it at that.

You've Been Sentenced

This game holds more promise, and is a grammarians dream.  It consists of over 500 5-sided cards with variations of the same word.  Each player gets 10 cards and attempts to make a sentence that is grammatically correct, while using as many cards as possible since they all have point values.  I bought this hoping to use it in the classroom.  Not sure when that will happen, but it is definitely a possibility. 

The thing about You've Been Sentenced is that you can't help but make crazy, silly sentences.  It isn't meant to be serious by any means.  The main point is to get it put together in a grammatically correct fashion.

Here is the one I put together today, with 10 cards I randomly gave myself:

Hairy ducks changed quickly to playing with saucy necklace.

May not make a great deal of sense (no way to include what they were doing before they changed), but I believe it is grammatically correct. This game takes some practice, yet I'm still interested in bringing this to my students as a table activity one day.  They really do love playing with words, and it will give us another way to talk grammar.  We need that!