Making Words with Your Little Leprechauns

Hi, Teaching Friends!

Do you use making words activities with your K-2 students?  If your little learners are crazy about leprechauns, here’s a word building activity that they’ll love!

What are “making words” activities?

These activities have been around in many forms for decades! If you’ve ever solved a Jumble puzzle in the daily newspaper, you know just what they are!  There are two forms of these activities:

• Begin with all of the letters in a word and rearrange them, using some or all of the words to build new words.
• Begin with a pile of letters, moving them around to create as many words as possible, with the ultimate achievement being to use all of the letters to create one long word.  Not unlike Scrabble or Words with Friends!

It sounds like fun, but are there academic benefits to these word building activities?

Definitely!  

• If you play Scrabble or Bananagrams or similar word games,  you know that one really quick way to rack up the points is to change the first letter to another letter or consonant blend or digraph, keeping the rest of the word the same.  Hello, onset/rime substitution! What a great way to build your students abilities with making these transitions smoothly in both reading and writing! Including activities like these in your literacy centers might even get your students to start really using your classroom anchor charts for common rimes!
• Another common way to add to your points to your total quickly in word games is with inflectional endings.  As they have the opportunity to do more activities with letter manipulation, your students will begin to search for  -s, -ed,  and -ing before they even make the root words!
• If you’re teaching prefixes and suffixes, remind your students of their usefulness when you introduce activities like these. 

This making words activity for St. Patrick’s Day will keep all of your students happy and LEARNING! To make your job even easier, this activity is differentiated at two levels, and even saves you time by including a teacher page of suggested words.

If you’re looking for more St. Patrick’s day fun and learning, try these six math games to play with lucky gold coins!

Happy Teaching!