Friday Five - Five Word Activities to do as a Family

These word activities can be fun to do as a family, to use during school breaks to keep learning going, or to use as part of your school day. Since we don't have any spare time during our school day, these have become games we play as a family after dinner occasionally.

1. Acrostic Poems
In an acrostic poem, the letters of the subject are written down vertically to form the word of choice.  Next to each letter the poetic statement (or single word for younger children) is written horizontally to express the subject in an innovative way.  It's fun to come up with phrases or words to describe family members.  My kids love making acrostic poems with their names.

2.  ABC Lists
Choose a category (for example food or animals, countries, friendship etc) and list a word for each letter of the alphabet for that category. You can simply list words, or make sentences.  We were tickled to find that this was an exercise in chapter 1 of the Edgewood Life of Fred book.

3. Word Box
This activity is a bit like magnetic poetry.  It does require a bit of prep, but you can reuse it.  You need a small box or bucket of words.  I just did a Google search for "Magnetic Poetry Printable" a wide variety of free ones came up.  You can choose the one you like best and print it out, then laminate it (optional), and cut the words apart.

Take a handful of words and arrange them so the words make some sense. See if you can make it sound a bit poetic. You can add an extra word or two if they aren't on the slips.  Then copy out your poem.

4. Scoop and Spell
Scoop and Spell works well with this tub of alphabet tiles.  However, you can put all your All About Spelling Tiles in a tub and use those.  Or you can print these, laminate and cut them apart and use those.  These tiles work well too.

Scoop out three spoonfuls of letters onto your work space .  Make as many words as you can using those letters.  Copy your words onto a piece of paper or in a notebook (optional).  Write (or just do aloud) two sentences using the words you made.

5. Math Spelling
Choose one of your spelling or vocabulary words.  Count the number of vowels and write down the number.  Count the number of consonants and write it down.  Now multiply the two numbers together. From your answer add the total number of letters in the word and then subtract the number of syllables.

This can be adapted in many ways. You could just do adding.  If the first product is large enough, you could actually subtract the total number of letters from the product.

Which activity might you try with your family?

Do you have another game or activity worth mentioning?  Leave it in the comments.

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