Learning A-Z Content Developer, Karly Foster, talks about how word work activities like word games, word searches, or word ladders help kids develop reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. She suggests some fun activities that work great for summertime while students are away from school.
Hi. I'm Karly Foster, and I'm a Content Developer with Learning A to Z. In addition to reading, spelling and other word work activities are an important part of developing our kids' reading and spelling skills. So what are some things that you can do at home over the summer to help your children?
So let me give you some ideas of things that we do at our house. One thing we really like to do is paint the tops of our desks with dry erase paint or chalkboard paint, and then we let the kids write directly on the surface. So we might try to build a poem together as a family, or we try to come up with as many rhyming words as we can. Or maybe we'll build a word ladder. We also play a ton of word games; so Scrabble, we play Scattergories, Taboo, which is another great way to engage your children and boost their vocabulary. Another thing I've noticed with my own children is that if I leave word games or crossword puzzles or word searches, or a fun paper and pencil laying around, they naturally gravitate towards those things, and I'll find themselves playing around with the words in the games.
So making time for word work activities is vital, because it helps those patterns and words move into long-term memory, which then leads to a richer, more extensive vocabulary.
