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I think now is as good a time as any to admit a bit of a minor confession.

I sometimes have so much trouble reading primary source documents.

I've got article 9 in the articles of Confederation in front of me. I think I've read it 10 times.

I don't know what I mean. These documents were written a long time ago.

They can be hard to understand. Primary sources are difficult to bring to life.

This is Paul Bogus. He's a teacher at Daghamershaw Middle School.

A lot of times in a classroom it's very easy to give your standard quiz where the kids will read

through the documents. They'll name the different parts and spit it back on a test.

But I wanted my kids to ingest the documents a little bit differently.

So how on earth do you convey to someone the challenges of governing under the articles

Confederation without putting them in a chair and making them read it a hundred times?

So Hannah, imagine you're sitting in a class. You're about to do a blah blah boring day.

And your teacher comes in with his giant sack of blocks and just dumps them on the table.

Heads up. No class today. We're going to play a game.

Oh you love games. I do. So the teacher queues up some war music

and they play articles of Confederation.

The class is divided into teams which are states and more students are put in the bigger states.

So the group of eight represented Virginia, the group of six represented Pennsylvania,

the group of four represented New York, the group of two represented Connecticut,

and finally the one lonely kid by themselves represented Delaware.

Oh poor Delaware. But each state got a different amount of blocks and was told to make a big strong

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