"I felt humble, one more set of footprints on a dusty well-worn path, discovering something new that's not new at all, and I was thankful."
I am planning to try daily themes in our home school this year. The other day on Bravewriter’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/bravewriter?hc_location=stream&filter=1), someone asked the question about Word Wednesday’s. What a great theme! So I am going to collect the ideas here to be able to reference later.
WORD PLAY WEDNESDAYS!
- poetry fridge magnets
- Holly Dong I don't know what Word Wednesday is, but we play a word game where you select a category (say animals) and the person has t name one using the last letter of what you said. So for example, "cat," next person says, "tiger" using the t. I didn't think my son would like it, but he did. When he was younger we used to play "Fortunately, Unfortunately" where you spin a story, one person saying only fortunate events and the other only unfortunate. Mostly we do them in the car or waiting in line though.
- Melissa Rhymer Here are 2 we played all the time when my kids were younger and they still reasurect them as teenagers. We played in the car on our weekly trips to the city. 1) story crafting :we tell stories one sentence at a time each person taking a turn to add the next sentence. You NEVER know how these stories are going to end up! 2) sentence structure : each person picks a part of speech 1st person chooses a noun, 2nd. Chooses a verb 3rd chooses a prepositional phrase and together you have a silly sentence. You could add adjectives foe the noun for more people. It might look like this "The balloon catapulted around the bend" it was always challenging to find great verbs and to make our choices work with the other choices. Helped with tenses and such
- Michelle Oliver I don't know what Word Wednesday is either, but we play some word games at poetry tea times. Here are a couple examples: Each person writes down 10 words, put them all in a "hat" and then everyone draws 10 and arranges them into a random poem-like piece. Each person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, folds the paper so you can only see the last word and the next person writes a sentence beginning with the word that shows. Mad libs are always fun. Play the "teapot" game, where one person leaves the room and the others think of a word that they then substitute with the word "teapot" and use in sentences when the "it" person re-enters. "It" tries to guess what the actual word that was chosen is. Lots of word games like this can be found. Even versions of Boggle and Spill and Spell are really fun...scrabble, upwords, etc. Gee..think we need a game night!
- Katharine Wise We used to play I Spy but incorporate some phonetic clues. We'd also build on the clues as they guessed. For example: I spy something that rhymes with red. Is it Dad's head? No, it's brown. Is it...? No, it starts with /b/. The mixture of clues allowed all ages to play. If they didn't yet know letter-sound correlations they'd figure it out based on the other clues but start to become familiar with the sounds. We might also have played this as "I'm thinking of something..." that wasn't actually present (eg, a bear).
- Shalynn Burnham Wilson Here's a link to a totally free book called Word Play Cafe. It has some fun ideas.http://dogfoose.com/wordplay-cafe/
dogfoose.com
This one’s for the teachers. Within the last few years, we’ve been stretched quite thin when it comes to budgetary matters, and very few sectors of our economy have witnessed as dramatic a cut in s...
- Kiersten Pasciak If you have devices with apps, "Seven Little Words" is a fantastic app! There are 2 versions now, with one meant for younger kids. My kids love playing both versions with me.
- Kiersten Pasciak Word Pirates, Appletters, Bananagrams, Pairs in Pears, Quiddler, Scrabble Slam, Pictionary Bend a Clues, Hangman, and Scattergories are some more good games for playing with letters and words. You can modify most games to be cooperative and play face up if you have younger kids playing
With Apples to Apples, we had my emerging reader play with us and just swap cards with the box if she couldn't read one of the cards in her hand. We helped with any words she didn't know when she was the judge. If we only had 3 players, we added a random card from the box each time to give the judge more answers to pick from. That makes the game sillier sometimes too There are younger versions for the game too, including a 7+ version and a 9+ version. We also play so that when the game ends, you read whatever green apple cards are in front of you and those "describe" you. It lightens the mood for the non-winners.
- Anne LaFleur 1. We used to play a round of Boggle and then write stories using as many of the words on our lists as we could. 2. We still play this game, a poetry version of "Exquisite Corpse": First person writes two lines of a poem, then folds the paper so only their last line is showing and hands it to the next person. #2 player then writes two lines, folds the paper so only their last line is showing and hands it to the next person. After 3 or 4 stanzas you unfold and read the poem. 3. Make a birthday card for someone by writing "Have a very ________ Birthday". Fill in the blanks with lots of words you cut out from magazines. You could also do a self portrait poem this way, cutting words from magazines. I hope this helps.
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