Parlor Games
Belle Meade is the plantation down the road, and they have a great assortment of homeschool offerings. Today we attended the Plantation Parlor Games & Pastimes. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but a combination of fantastic weather, quick moving activities, attending with friends, and 6 minute drive from our house, combined to make a splendid outing.
The entire event began with the whole group watching a puppet show with an assortment of puppets. Kids are such fans of physical humor. A funny tilt of the head, or a horse brandishing a sword with its mouth, these are all sure-fire laugh generators.
Enthralled by the puppets:
Then we broke into smaller groups for various sessions. Our group started by playing the Victorian Parlor Game “Tableau.” We broke into three groups, and by sheer happenstance, our group was all kids who had been in the HS gym class at the Y last session, so all the children and Moms knew each other, which was fun. Tableau is like charades, except you work in groups, and you freeze in a scene. For example, our scene was “Ice Skating” so we each chose a way to represent that, and then the larger group guessed what we were doing.
From there we moved to the dance session where we learned the Virginia Reel.
We discovered we all like group dancing, especially when the steps are prescribed and we know what the steps are!
From the Virginia Reel we went to the Magic Lantern Session, which was my favorite. We had been thinking of a Magic Lantern similar to the scene from Tangled, but a Victorian Magic Lantern actually looks like this. Audience participation is required for a magic lantern show, and we clapped, drummed, neighed, and “Ta-Da’d” our way through the show.
On the right in the picture above, you can see the crowd prompts. It is the sign for “applause” in this picture. On the left was the narrator reading us the story, and the circle in the middle of the blown out picture showed the story of the wild mustangs who became part of a circus.
From the Magic Lantern we moved outdoors to learn a couple more Victorian games.
In the game above, the person in the middle reads a story line by line. The circle acts out the line as hilariously as they can, and when the narrator laughs, a new narrator is chosen.
In the second game we played, an ordinary object is passed from person to person while the center “it” hides her eyes. After the count of 10, all hands go behind backs, and “it” has to guess who holds the object. The children were cackling like crazy during this one.
Time spent with friends, learning new things, outdoors on a gorgeous day.
Happy, happy, happy.
