Scrabble Hack for Spelling Practice

Need a fun way to practice spelling? This Scrabble spelling hack is great for fun spelling practice with all ages (and multiple kids)!It appears to be my life goal to find learning activities that include all of my children and their many different levels of learning.  I attempt to combine addition and multiplication, for example.

Let’s face it, homeschooling takes time and homeschooling more than one child takes more time (that feels like such an obvious statement).

Trying to accomplish everything in homeschool times 3 is just not happening.  So we work together on as much as possible.  And that means finding creative ways to practice concepts even when they’re not on the same level.

Scrabble Spelling Hack

Scrabble leads itself to spelling, doesn’t it?  But my issue with scrabble is that you have to know how to spell the words.  Not practice spelling the words.

In All About Spelling there is a focus on words that are grouped together. So one week we might word on -tion words.  Then we spend time practicing the rules around that concept.

 

So I wanted to use the Scrabble idea but adjust it so we could really practice the spelling and also work altogether.  And thus we ended up with a Scrabble hack that worked quite well.

First, we put out all of the tiles face up (and I collected the spelling words from the most recent AAS lessons).  Since each child is at a different point in their spelling lessons, they all had their own spelling list.

 

I added the word “SPELLING” to the middle of the board as a starting off point.  Then we took turns.  I would give them a word from their spelling list.  They would collect the appropriate tiles and then find a place on the board they could put it.

We adjusted the Scrabble rules to slightly.  They were having trouble finding places for some words and we ended up unintentionally putting two tiles next to each other that didn’t make a word.  I let it go.  I tried explaining it but they were so lost.

Since the letter tiles have numbers on it, we decided to throw in some math.  They got to add up their words and give themselves a score.

It wasn’t really fair considering one child was working on CVC words which were 5 or 6 points each and another was getting words with 10 letters.  But I just told them it wasn’t a race to the top.

All in all, they practiced a full set of spelling words in about 30 minutes while enjoying the game aspect.  And we all got to work together as a family.  It was actually quite pleasant until someone knocked the board!