Sunday, February 27, 2011

Word Attack Game

There is nothing more frustrating than a child who continually "guesses" at a word when you KNOW they could read it correctly if they would just "sound it out".  We spend so much time giving them the skills then need to decode words and for some reason there's always those few (or several, as is the case for me this year) who just look at the firs letter or two and take a wild guess.  During a particularly challenging session with one of my guided reading groups this week, I told them they have to "attack" the word.  Like, really attack it and "break it apart" into all the parts they know.  This particular group was mostly boys and the idea of "attacking" a word held HUGE appeal.  They started decoding all kinds of words and I could see their confidence building and building.  Hence, this game was born.  This week we worked on words with inflectional endings, "s, ed and ing".  In addition to all the vowel patterns we have introduced, the words and stories just keep getting harder and harder.  I made the game to be adaptalble for various skill levels.  You just need to make your own set of word labels to attach to the game cards.  I hope your kids can have fun with this.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing this game. I'm a pre-service teacher and used this with a boy I was tutoring. I made a "karate kid" headband and wrote "Word Attack Master" on it for when he won. Success!

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