All of us know the classic scrabble game. The rules are quite complex and specific, so I have a couple of versions of the game to expediate the time, and make it easier on the students to come up with words.
Print out, laminate, cut, and put tiny magnets on the back of individual cards. You can easily use hundreds of those tiny magnets if you have them, but they feel oddly satisfying to use.
Optional: Included a set of special tiles that act as replacements for the 'double word score' or 'double letter score.'
Students get pretty excited when they can make a regular W twice as powerful with a simple A.
JHS 2 and up, although JHS 1 can play this game if they have a larger class.
Rules suggestions/ideas:
- Increase the number of available letters per team to 15.
- Allow players to work in teams of 2 or 3.
- Allow students to orient their words in any direction - backwards is okay.
- Teams can either take turns with 2 minutes allowed for each.
- OR, teams can make their own crosswords within 5 or 10 minutes using their own letters only without taking turns.
- For the love of God make them use dictionaries.
Rules I still enforce:
1. All words must make sense. You cannot have adjacent letters that do not make a word.
2. No Abbreviations.
3. Japanese Romaji is only ok in the instance of being a place name such as Hokkaido, or a commonly Romanised word, such as Sushi.
Just played this with my JHS2 special ed class! Great idea but they're not too good with small pieces and too impatient for counting. To adapt, I just gave them a blank board and they each wrote in a color. Then tallied up how many letters in their color at the end. I have 4 students so we circled around 4 boards and in a 40 minute time, each student wrote down about 8-10 words. I'll definitely be coming back to this as my students loved it! Perfect for using new vocab!