Literacy Games for Kids: 3 Fun Games with Spelling

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Updated on: Educator Review By: Michelle Connolly

Literacy is one of the greatest and most important skills we can teach our children. Language brings us all together and allows us to communicate freely and openly while allowing us a platform to convey emotions and ideas in a public forum.

Children enjoy intellectual stimulation while being entertained by games and activities. Literacy games for kids is a perfect way to entertain your little ones by also offering them a productive and educational experience.

Literacy Games for Kids
Literacy Games for Kids

Using literary games for kids can also be multidisciplinary by encouraging fine motor skills as well as language skills. Help your children with literacy using games and let them have fun with spelling.

 

Literacy Games for Kids: Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills are buzzwords used by teaching professionals but they are essentially the movement of small muscles, so teaching children how to hold a knife and fork or writing with a pencil.

You can use literary games for kids to encourage and to develop their fine motor skills in a fun and interesting ways. Using a pipe cleaner and some small pieces of straws (which can be cut from larger ones), you can teach phonics and letter formation.

For the activity, get your child to insert as many of the small straw pieces into the pipe cleaner as possible. One the child has created their piece, you can encourage them to be creative with the pipe cleaner by attempting to form letters out of the object which they have decorated.

When the children form the letters, you can assist them with phonetics. Knowing that they have letter recognition, inserting the element of phonetics will help them long term with spelling and word formation. Get them to think about the word that they have created and the sound it produces.

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Motor Skills for Kids Blue Tube Forming The Letter N

There are multiple letters that the children can form with the pipe cleaner so allow them space for creativity to explore an array of letters. Let them have the decision on their letters and what they prefer shape-wise.

Eventually, you can show them patterns in the alphabet through the pipe cleaners by perhaps showing that some letters can be turned upside down to form each other. M and W are perfect examples of letters that invert to become one another.

Don’t feel pressured to get your children to recite the alphabet in order or to make your children form words from the alphabet. Allow them the opportunity to experiment and develop their letters and play with forming words.

Another lesson can occur where you correctly teach them the alphabet and they become more familiar with how words should be pronounced. Focus on how these letters are pronounced and formed, and a lot of pressure will be taken off you and your child.

These small steps using literary games for kids help with language development.

 

Letter Formation Paint Activities: Fun with Spelling

Learning letters is one of the first activities of language learning but it can be a rather tasking and mundane activity. There are plenty of literacy games for kids that manage to create wonderful and exciting methods of learning letters. These can even incorporate tasks like fine motor skills.

There are multiple ways for children to learn the English alphabet letters. Using a plastic bag that is sealable at the top, decorating it with paint is a great way to encourage children to learn language skills.

In the plastic bag, make sure to pour some of the paint inside, but make sure to be conservative with the amounts – you don’t need too much for the activity to flourish. You can leave paint for children to continue to practice with which will enhance their fine motor skills as they use their hands and small muscles to spread paint around the bag.

Make sure you have a pen with a nice, pointed end to allow children to use it during the process of learning the letters. Once the paint is spread evenly throughout the bag, kids can write the letters which can be done through leaving spaces within the spreading paint.

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Having a white sheet under the plastic bag is best as it allows for the letters to shine through.

A wonderful outcome of this activity is that, when learning the letter formation, the children won’t require a rubber or an eraser as they would on a piece of paper They can simply and easily use their fingers to spread the paint once again inside the plastic bag to allow for it to be written on again. This is an exciting and tactile experience for children and brings the idea of learning letter formation alive for them.

It gives the child the chance to be creative as well. You can use multiple colours of paint, mixing them together or use base colours. Whatever you have on hand. Make sure they know how to write down the letter and ensure they definitely understand it and have letter recognition. A fun and brilliant example of literacy games for kids.

 

Adjectives Galore: Literacy Games for Kids

Describing words or adjectives are vital parts of the English language. There are plenty of engaging literacy games for kids that make learning adjectives exciting and engaging. There are also plenty of easy methods to learn these things.

The premise of this activity is to teach children how to differentiate between adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Using a tool known as ‘Adjective Ping Pong’ and the idea is to choose which type you are going to play on. The rules of the game include not repeating the word twice, making sure the word chosen is an adjective and not a noun or a verb.

There is a time limit to this game and you have five seconds to come up with a different adjective. If a child loses, the other player gets the point. This is a fun, friendly game to play with children who are learning language and English skills.

There are plenty of other methods to illustrate learning what adjectives are, but this is a great example of literacy games for kids that help children engage with language in a fresh and dynamic way.

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