I tried something interesting with my kiddos a couple of Sabbaths ago that I thought you guys might want to try if you have kids.

Basically, we went through an exercise of "simulating" the development of the alphabet and of copying texts. I'm trying to get the kiddos ready for learning Hebrew a bit so this is kind of a first step down the path.

I'd have them write something like this "NTHBGNNGWHNGDCRTDTHHVNSNDTHRTHTHRTHWSFRMLSWSTLND" then have one of the other kids try to make out what was written. Then we would do it again by adding spaces and vowels etc. Then we started verifying the correct transmission of the text, first without checksums, then by adding a word count to each line, etc. Some very interesting combinations resulted when the text not immediately recognized.

It was fun to them to see when the messages would get messed up, or when something would work out.

We also tried to "develop" our own alphabet. Each kid needed to come up with symbols etc to represent the concepts, then sounds, etc. It was actually fairly challenging to try to come up with even a few pictograph based writing system ourselves and I think they learned quite a bit.