Secret Messages

Then Scary searched for a marker pen, and a pencil - he was going to try using them both to see which worked best for his secret message.

The bears were all very intrigued. What would Scary do next? He said he had thought of a very easy message for them to practise on first.

He lined up some lolly sticks flat on the table, vertically (that means the long sides run top to bottom - like in the pictures), all pushed up against each other, with no gaps.

Then Scary told the other bears to look away while he wrote the message down. Using the lolly sticks as if they were a piece of paper, he wrote the letters of the message across the joins of the lolly sticks so that when they were split apart again and shuffled around, there were bits of letters on each stick.

He then gave the sticks to Custard to see if he could put them back together again in the right order, so that the message could be read.