Latin Clue: Matrona Alba in culina fecit.

The board game Clue has been a family favorite for years.   I find Clue to be an excellent way to teach prepositional phrases.  To refresh your memory,  here is the board game:

     Players move their pieces from room to room and attempt to guess who committed the "murder." Each turn,  a player must make a statement, such as "Miss Scarlet did it in the study with the candlestick."  Then, they receive information from other players that perhaps it wasn't done in the study so the players move to a new room and make a different accusation.  The rules are fairly simple and are included with the game.  I don't intend to explain them here.  
     What is useful here is the repetition of ablative prepositional phrases that students must make throughout the game.   To play Latin Clue,  I simply have all the students make their accusations in Latin.  I teach them the names of all the Clue characters, rooms and weapons.  We then do several practice worksheets where we practice writing and translating: "Professor Plum killed Mrs. White in the conservatory with the knife."  Now during the game,  you usually don't say the victim since the victim is always "Mr. Body"  but I find that in practice, it's fun to add a different victim.  That way students get practice with nominative, accusative and ablative. 
   You may also be noting that "with a knife" isn't technically a prepositional phrase but rather ablative by means of and the "with" would be dropped.  While I understand the logic of this, I find that this activity works best to teach students about prepositional phrases.   The idea that you drop out the preposition in some cases is unnecessarily confusing.  Once students are comfortable with ablative prepositional phrases and can readily identify a work in the ablative case,  then I explain that some types of phrases do not use a preposition. However,  this occurs long after Clue is put back in the closet. 
    To do this activity,  you need to familiarize  students with the Latin words for the  Clue rooms, weapons and people list.  This word list is in the drive. I tend to write the Latin and then have students guess the English meaning.  There are many good derivative discussions to be had here about the words.  In a few cases, I have taken some creative liberties.  For example,  I called the revolver, novum telum because I wished to familiarize students with the word telum.  I called Miss Peacock,  Domina Purpurea because pavo, or peacock is a third declension noun and initially my students only work with first and second declension words. 
      The second step is to have students practice translating and writing Clue accusations in Latin.  I have several different worksheets also included in the drive.  Some classes have needed more practice than others.
       The third step is to divide the students into groups of 3-5 players, give each group a Clue board and have them play the game.  To facilitate making the accusations in Latin,  I have written the Latin counterparts on all the playing cards.  It is a good idea however that all students take their Clue word list to play the game so that they can refer to it. 
    In order to do this activity,  therefore,  you do need one Clue game for each 3-5 players.  Clue is fairly inexpensive, between $15-20.00 retail.  Make sure you get Classic Clue and not the deluxe version which is twice the price.  If you cannot convince whoever is in charge of purchasing to buy 4-5  games for your classroom,  you can acquire them through garage sales or simply by asking students to bring in their own game.   Some of my students have donated their boards to my class.  The Clue boards in my classroom take up an entire shelf in my closet.  New students always ask,  "Why do you have so many Clue games?"  "You'll see,"  I reply.