Word Games and Education

The name of Trivial Pursuit says it all. It's not educationally significant.  But, can we use games for significant educational purposes. The answer is YES. Yes we can!

Lets look at word games as an area.They can be used to build phonemic awareness, phonics sckills, word study skills, and a lot more!

Game that teach Phonemic Awareness:  Hink Pink,  For those of you who don’t know what a Hig Pig is, it’s a word game that asks you to solve a riddle. The answers are two rhyming one-syllable words.

There’s no order or score keeping and it’s easy to play:
Simply announce your hig pig clues to the other players as quickly as you can make them up. When someone guesses an answer, they shout it out. For example: “What is a hig pig for an overweight feline? Answer: a fat cat.”  There are also higgy piggies where the answers are two words, each with two syllables. For example: “What do you call a crab-like creature involved in organized crime? A mobster lobster!” (My daughter made that one up!)  

Phonics Games - Her'es a good list!  Phonics can help a person recognize more words, improve spelling, increase reading speed and comprehension, improve writing skills, help with pronunciation, and improve vocabulary. While a learner may still have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of some words, he or she will be able to sound out many more on his/her own.   Flash games are a great way for one to get started learning phonics!

Word Unscramble is a popular word game that is a variation on other word games such as text twists, jumbles and anagrams. Word Unscramble game. Since Word Unscramble is one of VocabularySpellingCity's free online games, you may also play Word Unscramble with your own word lists or use any of the thousands of existing lists on our site.

VocabularySpellingCity also has a game called Sentence Unscramble where players unscramble words to form sentences. Becoming a good word unscrambler really helps improve one's skills at other word games like Jumble™, Boggle™, Scrabble™, and Words with Friends™, as well as word search puzzles.

Review more on Vocabulary Games List.