want a word game?

1.  Have your kids grab some of their favorite color paint strips at the local home improvement store.

2. I used the light colored strips, cut them down to one each, and then used a square punch to punch holes in the left side of each strip.

3.  Using a sharpie, write common word families on the light colored strips with the square holes.

4.  On the narrow strips, write the alphabetic consonants, common blends (letters that are regularly used together) and digraphs (letters that are placed together to make a brand new sound – wh/sh/ch….)  Note:  I used similar colors for similar categories.

5.  Pick a word family to read and and slide the strip under the square to see if it is a “real” word or a “silly” word.

This is a fun game that I used while teaching and recently made for Hudson – it helps not only with word building, but recognition of “chunks” in words and a lot of other skills that are technical – if you really want to know, I’ll email you, but I didn’t want to bore the rest of the world.

I also found that at this site there are more detailed instructions and a list of phonograms (letter or combination of letters that represent a sound) that I used.

And this word is made of  2 phonograms:

       ARGH!