Many thanks to Renee Vlahos, Tessa Weadman and Caitlin Stephenson for help trialling these games and making the videos, and for the brilliant suggestion of Benny-Hill-style video theme music, which I think adds a certain je ne sais quoi, n’est ce pas? (Yes, I am up to the French bit in the brilliant History of English Podcast).
Save the file to your computer so you can replace any lost or damaged pieces, or make more copies.
Games with the word build included portable#
Put an elastic band around each of the decks, and you have small, cheap, portable edutainment.
Games with the word build included pdf#
we often put “ve”, “se” and “ge” after “ur” as in “curve”, “nurse” and “purge” and other two-letter vowel spellings, but we typically use “ve”, “ss” and “dge” after “short” or one-letter vowels, as in “give”, “mess” and “bridge”.Įach set of cards is supplied as a downloadable pdf which you print in colour on paper or light cardboard, laminate if you will be using the game a lot, and cut up (or ask kids to hone their scissor skills on it). These games provide opportunities to learn about how sounds typically combine in English e.g. I hope it will appeal to adults who love word games like Scrabble, Word Yahtzee and Bananagrams, and help get lots of kids off screens and talking to other people more often. Here’s an example game:įinally, a longer, more strategic, scoring game involving the creation of words both horizontally and vertically can be played. The third set of cards is an extension pack for the other two games, and contains a variety of vowel spellings as well as some less common consonant spellings not in the earlier games.Īs kids learn additional spellings (extra vowels like ee, oo, ea, ar, ur and ou, and also consonant spellings like ph and kn), and their vocabularies expand, these spellings can be added to the game from this third set. There’s no “E” vowel in this game because there are very few words with the spelling “e…e” as in “these”. The “long” or “split” vowels game can be used by kids who have been taught about split vowel digraphs (sometimes called “bossy E” or “magic E”), and again involves building words and then changing your opponent’s words. Two players or teams each build five words using the five vowel cards, then change each other’s words into new words. The basic “short” vowels game can be used by six-year-olds who know the alphabet and a few consonant digraphs.
The colour scheme has been revised thanks to feedback from people with red-green colour-blindness (oops, sorry).
The basic games are lot simpler, and young children can play them more successfully, as the less-common spellings are now in the harder games. These games are intended to provide practice blending and manipulating sounds in one-syllable words, and learning their spellings. I’ve been faffing around for ages trying to improve on my old word-building card games, and finally have a new set of three decks of download-and-print cards I’m happy with.