At-Home Spy Camp 🕵️

some easy ways to help your kids feel like secret agents 😎

Hi there!

To close out our month on courage, I thought it would be fun to help our kids feel like secret agents. We watched lots of videos such as “22 Spy Hacks” and these are the ones that I found to be the most doable. This will be an especially big hit if your littles ones have always wanted to visit an escape room.

The Narrative

Here’s the story: There’s a villain who is out to steal the happiness of others; ours was named Dr. Romblyschmitz, inspired by Dr. Doofenschmirtz from the show Phineas and Ferb. He stole my daughter’s birthday cake, because when he was young no one ever celebrated him, so he wanted to steal all the birthday joy. My husband shaved his facial hair in a funny way and made occasional appearances, and even sent taunting videos with the cake, which the kids loved! I can’t exaggerate how much fun they had with that element of pretend play. Here’s an appearance by him when we were outside!

Spy Training

The kids had to first go through lasers (red yard or thread taped to both sides of the hallway) and then do a “bravery test,” putting their hands inside a napkin-covered bowl with warm mystery contents…it was cooked spaghetti 😉 After these imitation tests, they were referred to as “Agent E”, or whatever their first initial is.

Clue-Finding

This is the most fun part! Preparation isn’t too bad: first, put a puzzle together that the kids will be able to solve, then flip it over, and write a message on it from your villain. Then, choose a bookcase in your home and hide the pieces in various books. Make a list of the titles you use. For kids who can’t read yet, you might want to stuff the pieces into a pile of picture books that the littles can flip through. Reserve a table nearby for assembling the puzzle as/after the kids find the pieces.

How will they know which books to look inside? This is where it gets super fun! Here are some ideas for ways you can hide messages in a contained space.

You can write messages with a thin paintbrush, using baking soda mixed with some water as your invisible ink—we did lots of tests; the proportions don’t really matter. When your kid applies heat to it—such as slowly going over it with a hair straightener!—the message will appear clearly! (Remember that these “messages” are book titles.)

The next trick is a pencil codex. Wrap a narrow strip of paper around a pen or pencil and write your message. When it’s unwrapped, it won’t make any sense…until your young spy wraps it around the pencil again to see what you wrote. (So the kids then went to the bookshelf and found my copy of Balanced and Barefoot; inside they found three puzzle pieces!)

This next one is a bit of a specialized talent¹ 😅 but it's worth a try! Write a mirrored message. The letters will be backwards when you first look at them, but if you hold the back of the paper up to the light, you’ll be able to see the message!

Last one: look in your pantry for any clear bottles with dark liquid: soy sauce, Coke, cooking wine, sesame oil, balsamic…I found quite a bit! With Sharpie, write your message on the bottom of the bottle. When the child holds the bottle upside down and the liquid rushes toward the lid, they’ll be able to see your message/book title!

After getting puzzle pieces from over thirty books, solving it, and flipping it over, this is the message they received. (You might want to use an easier puzzle with fewer pieces.) You also might want to take a picture of the message beforehand just in case something goes wrong and they’re not able to solve the puzzle.

You might want to tell the kids that maybe they should try to be nice to Dr. Romblyschmitz. Maybe we should even invite him to hang out with us/join us for the birthday party. Hurt people hurt people; maybe Dr. Romblschmitz needs to know that he doesn’t have to be alone.

Redemption

When we went into our backyard to find our package, we saw our villain with the birthday cake, and the kids called out that he is loved and that he’s invited to the birthday party. “Really, you’d invite me?” It’s kind of the whole let’s-show-the-Grinch-kindness scenario and it can be really sweet.

Whew. So. Feel free to adapt any of this for whatever you feel like doing and that your whole family would enjoy. (You have to enjoy it, too. That’s the rule.)
If you’re not celebrating a birthday, you can use a tub of ice cream or something special as the package that you’re following clues to find. You definitely don’t need a narrator or a live actor 😅 but it’s a special memory and a heck of a lot cheaper than an escape room!

Let us know if you try this, and feel free to share it with a friend!

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts

1. Learning how to mirror-write is how I passed the time in one of my high school classes. I don’t necessarily regret that usage of my time because it’s clearly come in handy even all these years later 😉