“Bananagrams! Catch. Pot. Baggage. Aiming. Lobotomy. Is. An. Queen. Riff.” I excitedly proclaimed to my brother, mom and dad as they all examined my board to make sure that it looked legitimate enough before we all shoved our tiles to the center again and started another round.
My family received this game called Bananagrams on Christmas from Santa Claus. Bananagrams basically embodies a new and improved version of scrabble where every player gets a certain number of tiles and races against the other players to form words and make their own personal scrabble board using all the tiles. Since we first opened the gift on Christmas morning, I can pretty safely say that my family has played a slightly unhealthy amount of this extremely addicting game. I do not know if it is the endless possibilities of words, race against the other players or something else that makes my family love this game so much…but regardless of the reasons, our addiction continues to grow and interfere with work and activities that should actually happen (kind of like data sheeting).
So here is where AP English ties in. With two smart, avid readers for parents, and an English major for a brother, I am at a slight disadvantage because of my age and other various factors when playing vocabulary based family games. My family used to always play scrabble and until recently, I am not embarrassed to admit, that I basically lost almost every time. But now I am excited and happy to say that I actually can hold my own in Bananagrams and even win a handful of times, which I think I have to directly thank AP English for. As I showed in my example at the beginning, I even found myself using “lobotomy” in one of my boards, which displays just one instance where my expanded vocabulary came in handy. So even though I may not have the opportunity to throw some of my AP English terms and words into everyday conversation…at least I can play a mean game of Bananagrams with them. If that does not show AP English functioning in the real world, then I do not know what will.
Carolyn, over this past holiday I have experienced almost exactly the same thing. My family also received Bananagrams for Christmas and we too played it way too much. Just like you we usually play scrabble as well but I do not think we even played that once now that Bananagrams is here. We played it constantly and it got to the point where sometimes as I was reading something else I would automatically try to put the words together in my head. Also, like you I found AP English extremely helpful in my games as I found myself using words like flippant or syntax.
ReplyDeleteWell Carolyn, I for one am simply ecstatic that you learned the word "lobotomy" and applied it in a board game. But in all seriousness, this actually sounds like a really fun game. As an avid board game player, I'll probably end up stealing your (copy?) or just sitting here passively and forgetting about this blog post tomorrow. Thanks!
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