My Front Door!

What Your Front Door Says

You are bold, brave, and easily excited. You are passionate about what you believe. And you're never afraid to tell people exactly what you think. You're picky and particular. It's sometimes hard to meet your standards.

The Front Door Test

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Hi Friends!

Just checking in to let you know I'm still alive and kickin'! We've been busy getting our schedule tweaked to work for us as we have resumed our homeschooling with Shane. He started 5th grade this year and we've had so much fun so far! Today's lesson in Heritage Studies, comparing Capitalism to Socialism, was very timely, I thought, considering the political/election climate in which we find ourselves. The picture on the chapter cover sheet showed a family playing Monopoly. At Shane's suggestion, we pulled out the old Monopoly gameboard to find out which one of us made the best capitalist. Well, Shane! He whipped me!

His text book gave a history of the famous board game that I'd like to share with you. I never realized what a "folk" game it really is. I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as we did!

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(The following is taken from "Doors of Opportunity" Heritage Studies for Christian Schools Second Edition, Bob Jones University Press.)

Do you know how to play the game Monopoly? Players buy property and try to improve it, collecting money from renters and paying taxes. The game teaches, among other things, that you have to pay more taxes when you own more land and that is easy to be ruined by overspending.

The game of Monopoly is something like the real business of buying and selling. People buy property they think will be valuable. They sell property when they need money or when they can make a profit. A profit is an amount that is more than the original cost of something. For example, if you buy a used bicycle for ten dollars and spend five dollars to fix it up and then sell it for twenty dollars, you make a profit of five dollars.

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INVENTING GAMES

The game that became Monopoly was probably invented by Elizabeth Magie Phillips, a woman who wanted to teach children that it was wrong to try to own everything. She called her game The Landlord's Game and had it patented in 1904.

But since The Landlord's Game was never packaged for sale, people in the area who played the game began to make up their own rules and to change some of the names of the places. And they called it Monopoly. Then others, especially college students going home on breaks, took the game to other states. Dan Layman took his new pastime to Indiana. There he made many changes and called the game Finance.

An Indiana woman took the game of Finance to New Jersey, where she and her friends named places on the board after places in Atlantic City---places such as Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens. Then the game came into the hands of Philadelphian Charles Darrow, who made his own board and rules and sold the package to Parker Brothers, a large manufacturer of games and toys.

But the game was not Darrow's invention; it was a folk game that had grown out of Mrs. Phillip's idea. When Parker Brothers discovered Darrow's lie, the company was already making a lot of money on the game. So the owners decided to buy out all other claims to Monopoly, including the original one. Mrs. Phillips got five hundred dollars for her rights to the game that became the world's most popular board game.