Whether it’s at home or in the classroom, we all know that children are more engaged and motivated if toys and games are involved. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some classic games that will improve the writing skills of your reluctant writers.
Boggle — If you’re unfamiliar with Boggle, then it’s worth discovering. In a nutshell, it’s a word game where you find words in sequences of adjacent letters in a plastic grid of lettered dice. Brilliant for setting your class a short challenge each day! How many words can they find? Can they improve on that number?
Not only can the game itself provide lots of fun for classroom work, there are also masses of possibilities to expand it. You can find some brilliant ideas here.
Scrabble — This is a classic, but with all the new technology around these days it often gets overlooked. There are heaps of ways you can use the Scrabble tiles in class for spelling practice, group grammar challenges, or creating your own crosswords. You don’t even need a Scrabble set, you can just make your own!
Story cubes — These are a favourite in many classrooms, but more fun is often found when you step away from the instructions to find alternative ways to use them. This awesome post shares ideas for 20 alternative ways to use Storycubes and each and everyone is ace!
Did you know there is also a Story cube app? Perfect for those tech lovers!
Scattergories — Who remembers playing this? Such a great party game, but (with slight modifications) is equally as good for the classroom. The aim of the game is to name objects within a set of categories, given an initial letter and within a time limit. Here’s a great idea for adapting that for classrooms and then setting your students the challenge of creating a story out of their choice of words! Great fun!
Pictionary — This word-based picture game is great for visual learners and can help children to review their vocabulary words easily. Splitting your class into teams and then give them an allocated amount of time to draw selected words for the others to guess is a super warm-up activity. You could extend this further by asking the children to take all of the words that were drawn and include them in a piece of writing. Perfect for getting the creative juices flowing!