Kids: Word Scramble Game

My 5 year old had a homework assignment to make 10 words from leprechaun. He had fun with this and was amazed at how many words we could come up with.

What was also fun was seeing him become comfortable with "playing" with letter order and combinations. So we have started to do this with other words.

Just this morning we came up with over 20 words from our last name, Thistle. Like this from thistle:

• this
• is
• I
• his
• sit
• list
• title
• let
• heist

This is a fun game to get kids excited about playing with words. Give it a try.

Letter War

My youngest is having some trouble deciphering letter case and with recognizing a couple letters.  So, how to make learning letters fun?

I came up with Letter War.  This is like the standard card game of War but instead of a deck of playing cards you print out a deck with upper and lower case letters on the cards.  Now play the game with the letter deck and score like this:

• Uppercase beat lowercase letters.
• The ranking from lowest to highest is: a..z,A..Z
• If the same lower and upper case letter is played then it is war.  This is less common in this deck of course.

Pretty simple I think.  Let's look at some examples:

• E and t are played: A wins
• A and a are played: War
• J and M are played: M wins
• c and v are played: c wins