Monday, July 23, 2012

Wordsmith Workout

I am officially addicted to "Words with Friends." It's a great way to keep up with family and friends and I just managed another win over uber-talented sister. Mostly, it gets me excited about words. 

I am thrilled to share this excitement with my students thanks to a grant I wrote with two other teachers. As part of our "Wordsmith Workout" grant, we were lucky to get THREE carts full of word games to use in our classrooms--Balderdash, Bananagrams, Boggle, Upwords, Scrabble Flash, and Scrabble. Of course, we threw in the official Scrabble dictionaries, too.

ATP ("Awesome Teaching Partner") and I are excited for all the ways these games can be used next year to provoke friendly competition and an excitement for language.

Did you know there is an official foundation called The School Scrabble Association? They have awesome lesson plans, bulletin board ideas, and other classroom resources. There's a great article here that explains all the benefits of word games on learning. We can't wait to use some of these next year and I promise to share the results and fun that ensues.


Wouldn't ATP look great in this?!

2 comments:

  1. Amy, there is a great word game put out by Out of The Box games titled "Word on the Street". It is a competative tug-of-war spelling game in which you try to be the first team to move 8 letters off the board and onto your side. The way this is done is a card is drawn with a phrase like "A Red Liquid" and the team has 1 minute to come up with a one-word answer (wine, punch, blood, merlot, etc)AND move the letters towards them. Only conconants are used in the game sans "X","Q" and "Z". The time limit makes it a challenge as does coming up with words with the correct letters to prevent the other team from winning. Whew! Sorry for the long comment. I have the game if you want to take it for a test run.

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    1. Sorry again, this is Eric. That isn't obvious by my blog name.

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