April 13 – Scrabble Day

Happy Scrabble Day!

I am a huge Scrabble fan.  Of course now that I play online, I play more often and I cheat!  You know, check out the words before I put them on the board, try letter combinations that may or may not be real words – basically do the things you are not allowed to do in a real board game.  But, in so doing, I have learned a lot of new words and I’ve had fun.

Kids learn the same way.  They learn the silent -e rule that turns cub into cube or rob into robe. They know that s- or -es lengthens a word. They learn to use other suffixes like -ed -ing or -ly. They learn prefixes like un- re- and dis-. They start to see vowel combinations -ai -ou -ee -ey -oo etc on their tray and look for places to use these. They start to use the h- to build sh- th- ch- wh- ph- words, or the r- to build br- tr- fr- pr- cr- gr- dr-. They even learn to build compound words where only a single word stood before, box becomes shoebox or man becomes snowman.

So today, grab some letter tiles and have some fun!

And if your little one is too young for spelling games, enjoy some great ABC books together!