Word Games

I've covered quite a bit of phonics with Angie and she's doing a stellar job of reading and writing.  She can spell any word that has a single short vowel in it, and now we've got to start thinking about more complex spellings.  So I'm trying some games with her to get her thinking about the different sounds that vowel pairs can make.

• Word Eggs:  We have these plastic Easter eggs that we used one year with Angie before she was old enough to appreciate coloring eggs and searching for them.  And now we use them to hold all sorts of things.  Currently, I fill them with plastic letter tiles that spell a word.  Since they're scrambled, Angie has to unscramble them to spell a word using all of the tiles. Then she records the word on a page.  I stick to 4 and 5 letter words right now.  But if we're working on the oo sound, I'll put words in that use the different vowel pairs that make the oo sound.  And then I'll put in a couple that use other sounds that we've already covere.  For instance, today we were reviewing the long O sound.  So her words were, cold, goes, slow, goal, toad, throw, home, stone, pain and zoom.  I chose zoom because she needs to practice writing her z's and we just did the oo sound yesterday.  I did pain because I wanted to see if she remembered that ai make a long A sound. Sometimes the letters can be arranged into a different word than what I intended, and that's ok.  As long as she finds a word.  (I gave her raft the other day and she came out with fart and a lot of giggling!)  She had trouble with throw and so I reminded her that when we see a t and an h we should think about putting them together if nothing else is working.
• Scrabble:  I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a scrabble board on paper and we're going to write in words as we think of them.  I'll put in the first word, then Angie must fill in a word that uses one of my letters.  Since we're not playing with tiles, any word she can think of will do.  It eliminates the pressure, I think, of having to deal only with the tiles you have.  When we've tried to play scrabble before, I'll hear her say, "Oh, I want to make bus but I don't have a B!"  So this will let her be creative with her words without confining her to the tiles yet.
• Letter Swap: We use tiles for this game too.  I'll start with a word and she has to change one letter to make a new word.  Then I have to change one to make a new word and so on.  So we can go from TOAD to LOAD to LOAF to LEAF, etc.  I try to make changes that will lead to her finding a word that she knows, but sometimes we get stuck.
• Word Searches and Crossword Puzzles: I make up my own simple crosswords with clues that I know she can read.  These were tricky to create in the beginning when she only knew three letter words and a few blends, but it's becoming easier over time.  I like word searches because they promote logical thinking, too.