Sunday, April 20, 2008

Passover Game: Roles and Items

I created this game in the last few minutes before Passover began (actually, before shabbat began).

I make three sets of papers: personalities, items, and books. There was one paper in each set for each of my seder participants; we were twelve people for seder, so I made twelve personalities, and each personality had a corresponding item and book.

I shuffled these up and gave one paper from each set to each of our participants, i.e. each person got one random personality, one random item, and one random book.

During the seder, if you touched your nose or ear you were to speak as if you were the personality on your paper. The object of the game was to return to the correct personality their item and book.

So you not only had to figure out who was who, you also had to figure out which item and which book belonged to which personality.

The personalities I used included:
PersonalityItemBook
PharaohAsprin [1]Seven Habits of Highly Effective Kings
MosesChapstick [2]Living with a Foster Mother
YochevedBaby CarriageReawakening Desire in Your Spouse [3]
MiriamBinoculars [4]Sisterhood is Powerful
AaronCloset [5]He Aint Heavy, He's Your Brother
MagicianDeck of CardsThe Idiot's Guide to Magic
MidwifeForcepsNatural Childbirth
TzipporahMace [6]On Being a Single Parent
GodGauntlets [7]Nation-Building
YitroRadio [8]A History of the Jews
Serach Bat AsherWheelchairBible Codes [9]
Pharaoh's DaughterFishing RodRaising a Foster Child

This was last minute, so some of these could be better, and some items could belong to more than one person. But you get the idea. In any case, the game went over pretty well, so there you go.

Yehuda

[1] Helps with hard hearts.
[2] Helps with chapped lips.
[3] Yocheved's husband wanted to separate from his wife so as not to produce any babies.
[4] Miriam watched Moses in the Nile from afar.
[5] Aaron had many clothes as high priest.
[6] Tzipporah needed this to chase away shepherds at the well.
[7] To put onto his strong hand and outstretched arm.
[8] Yitro heard about what happened to Israel in a distant land.
[9] Serach was very old and knew the correct code words that would identify a real savior for the Jewish people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your four sons game/activity went over very well. My wife added a number of new sets of four to your suggested list, including adding the Monkeys to Beatles in the music theme. My parents are very traditional, so I wasn't expecting much. But they really loved it. In fact, my mother wanted to try it again at lunch the next day.

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Thanks. It works if you have a manageable size. We had twelve, which is too many. A few of us did the activity, but then it dragged on with some people, so we postponed the rest of them until dinner time.

Still, everyone enjoyed it.

Yehuda