1. Hands-on Learning Games 6 Activities to Help Your Child Learn to Spell (and Understand) Words

2. Practicing spelling is probably one of the more irksome activities children face in school. Today some schools are more enlightened, and now there are all sorts of interesting ways teachers teach spelling, ranging from word walls, to make the magic word.

3. 1.Riddles The 7-10 year old age group especially enjoy this ancient pastime. Using a spelling word as the answer, you or your child try and think of a riddle that goes with it. There are the obvious (“What lives in a cave and hangs upside down? A b-a-t), or you can get really creative and think of some real knee slappers. If you want to go really wild your child can make their own joke booklet: your child can illustrate it and print out, allowing them to review the words on their own next time.

4. 2.Missing Words This is a fill-in the blank game. You start off by writing a few of the spelling words at the top of a paper. Underneath, you write sentences that can be filled in the blank using the words. Once your child understands the words, you can leave out writing the spelling words on the top of the paper; then the sentence itself is the clue, and the child has to guess the word and fill it in the blank.

5. 3.Crossword Puzzles Although there are software programs that do this, it’s a lot more fun to do it on your own. Between making the clues and making the boxes for each word (you have to spell the words in order to get the right number of boxes!), your child will have plenty of practice with their spelling words

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7. 4.Classification In this game, you dictate groups of words. Your child has to cross out the word that doesn’t belong, and explain why it doesn’t fit in that category.

8. 5.Creative Writing Choose a picture from a magazine or a book. Have your child write a sentence or two about it using one of spelling words. Older children might choose to skip the picture; you can then have them write a story using the spelling words. You write once sentence, and they have to write the next one using a spelling word. Afterwards read the whole story together.

9. 6.Word jeopardy T his is a game of quick thinking. You say one word, and your child has to answer with a spelling word that’s related to the word you said. An easy example would be Thanksgiving: your child answers “t-u-r-k-e-y.” You can have your child give a synonym or an antonym, depending on the types of words they need to study. This also works with more technical words, such as those you might have in science or history. For example, if you say “plant,” your child would answer s-y-n-t-h-e-s-i-s.