Playing with Words

HOW TO PLAY WITH WORDS EVERYDAY….

As a Year 1 Teacher, I would always be looking for opportunities for ‘playing with words’.

• colouring in sounds,

• counting how many words had double letters in our big book,

• underlining all the ‘ing’,

• circling the ‘th’,

• ‘cutting’ the words into syllables,

• counting the letters in words,

• finding words with same initial sound, end sound,

• finding words which have 3 letters,

• finding words which rhyme,

• sentences starting with ‘The’,

• looking for question marks and quotation marks in sentences,

• shortest word, longest word,

• words where the third letter is ‘a’,

• having little competitions to see who can find the most interesting word patterns in books and

soooo much more.

Once the children get the ‘hang’ of this – THEY COME UP with all sorts of interesting patterns and love letting you know what they found.

A terrific way to observe just how much this helps is to allow children to become the ‘teacher’.  

Absolutely amazing to watch what questions they come up with when asking their peers to find certain patterns….love watching them do this….

IMMERSE CHILDREN IN WORDS….

Have fun with words…….IT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE…..