At Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club this week we used the Dancing Men Cipher, from the Sherlock Holmes short story of the same name.

Our activity was to make a set of Ancient Greece Top Trumps playing cards. I had made the cards, featuring an image, a description and the statistics, but without the name of the god, goddess, mortal or creature. The children had to decode the name using the cipher, then write it on the card. There were 34 cards in total, which the children completed between them. We then had a game of Top Trumps. The magic category was the most popular.  We finished with a matching pairs memory game: the pairs were all characters from Ancient Greece. These activities really helped to consolidate the children’s growing knowledge of Ancient Greece mythology.