Phonological awareness word games

Phonemic Awareness Activities For A Strong Reading Foundation

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a concept that deals with identifying and manipulating single sounds in words, known as “phonemes”.

A phoneme is the smallest possible unit of sound in a language. Phonemes blend together to form words, and every word we use is made up of a combination of them.

Even though there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, there are 44 unique phonemes in English (and 250 different ways to spell them!). Fortunately, especially in words beginners need to read, most of the sounds are linked to one main letter.

If you change any letter in a word, though, you change everything! For example, take the word “rag.” If the first sound, or phoneme, of the word is changed to a “b,” then you’re left with an entirely new word (bag) with its own distinct meaning.

So when you think about it, building phonemic awareness is really about your child playing around with sounds and then switching sounds in words. It’s like a Dr. Seuss book come to life!

Why Is Phonemic Awareness Important?

It’s hard to learn how to read if you can’t match sounds to letters. That’s where phonemic awareness comes in.

Kids are often asked to “sound out” words they don’t recognize or understand. A firm grasp of phonemic awareness is the backbone of this technique!

Understanding how to break down unfamiliar words into individual phonemes can be an incredible, powerful tool for your child to use on their learning journey.

Phonemic awareness skills can also help build your child’s confidence and familiarity with the sounds and letters they are trying to read. The more comfortable they are with letter sounds the better prepared they will be for a lifetime of learning and reading!

Fun And Easy Phonemic Awareness Activities

Now that we’ve discussed what phonemic awareness is and why it’s important, we’ll walk you through some fun and easy activities you can use to help develop your child’s phonemic awareness skills.

Guess-That-Word

If you’d like to give this activity a go, lay out a few items or pictures in front of your child. Aim to use familiar objects that they can easily name.

Let them know you’ll be using “snail talk” or “slow-motion” talk, meaning you will be announcing the names of the items in a funny voice. Their goal is to guess the name of the item or picture in question before you finish saying the word.

For example, if there’s a picture of a cat in front of your child, drag out the C, A, and T sounds as long as you can. Your child can jump in anytime and shout the word of the object as loudly as they can!

This game works on blending phonemes, an essential part of phonemic awareness. The game helps encourage children to pay attention to the individual sounds that make up words.

Mystery Bag

Those little plastic letter magnets that are probably hanging out on your fridge will come in handy for this one!

If you choose to do this activity, you’ll need a spare box or paper bag. Place three plastic letters that can be used to make an easy-to-sound-out word (pat or cat, for example) inside the bag.

Suggest your child pull out one letter at a time. Ask them what sound each letter makes. For younger children, you can place the letters together to spell a word and sound it out for them. Then let them copy you.

You can ask older children to try to make a word on their own. If they make tap instead of pat that’s fine, of course! With more advanced readers, also consider adding more letters to make longer words.

Additionally, you can try letter swapping or letter deletion. Your child makes slip but what happens when you “steal” the “s” or the “l”? This kind of letter change is challenging but is also excellent practice!

Finally, you can also put lots of letters in the bag and then pull out a few and see if you can make a real word, a nonsense word, or (lacking a vowel) no word at all.

The mystery of the Mystery Bag is how versatile it is!

Clapping It Out

If your child loves to sing, this might be the activity for them!

You can sing any song or nursery rhyme. Simply have your child clap with the different syllables. Make sure you encourage them to clap loudly and enthusiastically for a fun learning experience!

This activity is great for helping your child with their syllable awareness as well as their segmentation skills.

Make Some Noise!

If you’d like to explore this activity with your child, grab a few things from around the house that make a lot of noise. Whistles, pots and pans, bells, or bubble wrap are all great options.

Instruct your child to close their eyes (no peeking!) and listen to the sound you make. Once the sound is over and they think they know what caused it, they can take a guess.

Encourage them to give their answer in full sentences (“The sound I heard was a door opening.”).

After your child is able to correctly identify several individual sounds, you can mix things up by adding more noises one after another. For example, if you close a noisy door, ring a bell, then delicately tap a glass cup with a fork, your child would try to identify all three sounds.

Although this game does not deal explicitly with letter sounds, it works on an extremely important skill — listening!

By helping your child practice their detailed listening skills, you can help them engage in more focused ways when they are listening and playing with word sounds.

I-Spy With Words

Another fun way to engage phonemic awareness skills is by playing the game I-Spy, but instead of colors, play with sounds. Plus, it’s mobile; you can take this game anywhere, so it’s perfect for busy families on the go!

You can say, “I spy with my little eye something that starts with the /a/ sound . . .” and wait for your child to shout out something they see that begins with that sound.

This helps them with focusing and identifying the initial letter sound in words, an important building block for strong reading as they grow.

Rhyme Matching Game

If you want to try this activity, print out pictures of common items that rhyme. For example, chair/bear, rat/mat, and so on.

Your child will try to match the pictures to make rhyming pairs. This activity could take some getting used to for your child, but patience and practice are on your side!

If you find that your young learner needs a little bit more exposure to rhymes in order to understand how to match up the pictures, don’t be afraid to break it down for them.

You can tell them that rhymes are words that sound the same at the end. If it seems helpful, you can sit with your child and brainstorm rhyming words with them. Having you walk them through it step-by-step could be the extra support they need!

Make Your Own Rhyme

We mentioned that all of these phonemic awareness activities may make you feel like you’re living inside a Dr. Seuss book. But your child will love becoming their very own tongue-twisting, silly master of rhyming!

Dr. Seuss makes up all kinds of words in his books in order to create rhymes. Your child can do the very same thing (and learn a lot from it!).

You can get them started by providing them with a funny example. Something like, “There’s a noodle in my schmoodle.” Encourage them to come up with their own funny rhyme!

Drawing A Phonetic Alphabet

If you feel like your child needs to focus specifically on the phonetic sounds our alphabet makes, this might be a great exercise to choose.

You can work with your child to draw animals that make the same sounds as alphabetic letters.
For example, draw a big, winding snake in the shape of an “s.” Since snakes hiss, they’re a wonderful representation of the sss sound.

Another option could be a buzzing bee. When bee’s fly near your ear, they make a loud “buzzz-zzz,” sound. You could help your child draw a bee flying across the pattern, with a dashed line in the shape of a “z” to show their path!

Feel free to get creative, colorful, and fun here. This will help your child hone in on their isolation skills, as well as help them learn to pay attention to their phonemes!

Find The Best Phonemic Awareness Activities For Your Child

We know your child is unique. Which learning activities they respond to best might be slightly different from those a child in their class or the kid next door responds to.

This is normal! Phonemic awareness activities are all about what helps your child learn in the most fun, effective, and easiest way possible.

We hope some of these suggestions gave you creative, new ideas for working on phonemic awareness in your home. If you ever find yourself wanting to explore more ideas, try our learning quiz to find more options that are just right for your child!

No matter which of these phonemic awareness activities you choose, your child is on their way to a happy, lifelong love of learning. We’re so excited to be on this journey with you!

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Activities for Your Kindergartener

That's a complicated sounding term, but it's meaning is simple: the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in spoken language. Phonological awareness is really a group of skills that include a child's ability to:

The most sophisticated phonological awareness skill (and the last to develop) is called phonemic awareness — the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. When playing with the sounds in word, children learn to:

Strong phonemic awareness is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Children who struggle with reading, including kids with dyslexia, often have trouble with phonemic awareness, but with the right kind of instruction they can be successful. Learn some of the warning signs for dyslexia in this article, Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood.

Parents can make a big difference in helping their children become readers by practicing these pre-reading oral skills at home. Try some of the simple rhyming and word sound games described here.

Why phonemic awareness is the key to learning how to read

This video is from Home Reading Helper, a resource for parents to elevate children’s reading at home provided by Read Charlotte. Find more video, parent activities, printables, and other resources at Home Reading Helper.

Try these speech sound activities at home

Rhyme time

“I am thinking of an animal that rhymes with big. What's the animal?” Answer: pig. What else rhymes with big? (dig, fig, wig)

Road trip rhymes

While you're out driving in the car, spot something out the window and ask your child, "what rhymes with tree or car or shop?" Then switch roles and have your child spot something and ask you for a rhyme. This can turn into a game of nonsense rhymes ("What rhymes with tree stump?") but that's great for practicing sounds, too!

Word families

Word families are sets of words that rhyme. Start to build your family by giving your child the first word, for example, cat. Then ask your child to name all the "kids" in the cat family, such as: bat, fat, sat, rat, pat, mat, hat, flat. This will help your child hear patterns in words.

Silly tongue twisters

Sing songs and say silly tongue twisters. These help your child become sensitive to the sounds in words.

Tongue ticklers

Alliteration or "tongue ticklers" — where the sound you're focusing on is repeated over and over again — can be a fun way to provide practice with a speech sound. Try these:

• For M: Miss Mouse makes marvelous meatballs!
• For S: Silly Sally sings songs about snakes and snails.
• For F: Freddy finds fireflies with a flashlight.

Syllable shopping

While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food names. Have them hold up a finger for each word part. Eggplant = egg-plant, two syllables. Pineapple = pine-ap-ple, three syllables. Show your child the sign for each and ask her to say the word.

"I spy" first sounds

Practice beginning sounds with this simple "I spy" game at home, on a walk, or at the grocery store. Choose words with distinctive, easy-to-hear beginning sounds. For example, if you're in the bathroom you can say, “I spy something red that starts with the "s" ssss sound (soap).” 

Sound scavenger hunt

Choose a letter sound, then have your child find things around your house that start with the same sound. “Can you find something in our house that starts with the letter “p” pppppp sound? Picture, pencil, pear”

Which letter sounds do I teach first?

Reading expert Linda Farrell recommends that you begin with teaching the letter names, and then focus on the letter sounds that are closest to their letter names (such as /v/). And here's a great tip for teaching the trickier letter name–letter sound combinations — use arm motions. In this video, Linda demonstrates motions for /x/ and /y/. (From our video series Reading SOS: Expert Answers to Family Questions About Reading.)

Sound games

Practice blending sounds into words. Ask "Can you guess what this word is? m - o - p." Hold each sound longer than normal.

First sounds

When you’re reading together with your child, pick a word from the book and say it with emphasis on the first sound. Pick another word and compare them. “Zzz-zookeeper and rrr-rhinoceros. Can you hear what sound zzz-zookeeper starts with? Is it the same as rrr-rhinoceros? 

Jump, skip, hop!

Create simple picture cards that you draw or cut out of magazines. Have your child, identify what's in the picture, and then break that word into its individual sounds. For example dog is d-o-g, three sounds (phonemes). Three sounds? You and your child do three jumping jacks, skips, or hops (followed by a high-five). You can also do this game outdoors without the cards, just call out simple words for your child.

Snail talk

Tell your child you're going to communicate in "snail talk" and they need to figure out what you're saying. Take a simple word and stretch it out very slowly (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/), then ask your child to tell you the word. Switch roles and have your child stretch out a word for you.

"I spy" blending

Here's an easy phoneme blending game you can play while talking a walk. For blending, you can say, “I see a sign that says s-t-o-p” Then your child has to blend the sounds to guess your word — stop. (Remember to say only the sounds in the word — not the letters.) Keep the words short, moving from two to three to four sounds depending on your child’s skill level.

Sound counting

Using LEGO bricks, beads, or pennies, say a word and have your child show you how many sounds the word makes. For example, top = t-o-p = three sounds, so your child would place three objects in a row. Then have them tap each object as they say the sound. Remember, your child is just showing you the sounds they hear. So the word bike would be = b-i-k (silent e) = only three sounds.

Rime house

Try this activity from the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR). The FCRR "At Home" series was developed especially for families! Watch the video and then download the activity: Rime House. See all FCRR phonological awareness activities here.

Phoneme dominoes

Try this activity from the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR). The FCRR "At Home" series was developed especially for families! Watch the video and then download the activity: Phoneme Dominoes. See all FCRR phonological awareness activities here.

Picture slide

Try this activity from the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR). The FCRR "At Home" series was developed especially for families! Watch the video and then download the activity: Picture Slide. See all FCRR phonological awareness activities here.

More phonological and phonemic awareness resources

Phonological games for preschoolers | Skyteach

Before learning to swim, children get used to the water, learn to breathe properly, and train to lie on the water. In the same way, before learning to read, a preparatory stage is needed - the child must learn to distinguish sounds and control them. This is called phonological awareness.

The development of phonological awareness includes the following steps:

• separation of words in a sentence by ear;
• selection of rhyming words;
• distinguishing syllables in words;
• onset recognition and roman. Onset is the initial phoneme in a word, and rima is the sounds following the onset. For example, in the word dog d is onset, and og is rima;
• identification of phonemes in words;
• fusion and separation of phonemes.

I will tell you how to develop phonological awareness through games. The games from the selection are suitable for preschoolers, younger students, as well as for all students who have difficulty learning to read. Tasks are easily adapted for group and individual lessons.

Candy Count

This game teaches you how to count the number of words in a sentence.

You will need a candy wrapper or a printed wrapper and counters such as fruit puree lids or large buttons. Say a sentence and put as many candies in the package as there are words in the sentence. Then the students listen to the sentences and lay out the sweets themselves.

Sample sentences:

• Children play.
• Read a book.
• Boys like cars.
• He likes dancing.
• Mary doesn't live here.

Hungry Spider

We train the ability to find rhyming words.

You will need a web drawn on a sheet of paper, cards with flowers and pictures of rhyming words: pink/sink, red/bread, black/sack, green/bean, brown/clown, blue/shoe.

Attach the web to a board or wall, and place the cards with the pictures of the objects around the room. Read the poem aloud, filling in the gap with the first words of the pair:

I'm A Hungry Spider (based on the tune “I'm a Little Teapot”)

I'm a hungry spider, in my web.

Looking for treats that rhyme with _____.

Can you find me a tasty treat?

Put it in my web. Let's eat!

Children must find an object with a rhyming name and fix it on the web, for example, with a magnet. For young children, make cobwebs on the floor with masking tape or masking tape.

Source: Rhyming Activity: I’m a Hungry Spider

Pick a rhyming pair

A task to find consonance in words - rhymes.

You will need cards with rhyming words or real objects with rhyming names. The words must be familiar or learned beforehand. Each child receives a card, walks around the classroom and says the word out loud until they find a rhyme. If the class is large, then the children match in pairs.

Possible word pairs: flag/bag, cake/snake, duck/truck, star/car, boat/goat, bug/rug, pear/bear, log/frog. The number of words depends on the level of knowledge of the child.

Calling animals

Task for distinguishing syllables.

You will need animal figurines, eg bull, donkey, camel, gorilla, elephant. We hide the animals behind our backs and invite the child to call them in turn, dividing the words into syllables. For example, ca-mel, e-le-phant. Clapping hands helps to clearly separate syllables.

In my lessons the animals usually miss their flight: This is the final call for passenger Donkey. Let's call him together. Don key! don key! Hurry up.

Magic pockets

We practice the ability to distinguish syllables in words and count them.

You will need three or four pockets and a stack of word cards. Say the word in syllables - students will count the syllables and put the card in the appropriate pocket.

Pop-it game

Learning to identify phonemes.

The teacher shows a picture and says the word and then breaks it down into phonemes, eg b-u-s . During the pronunciation of sounds, children push the appropriate number of buttons in the pop-it toy. If pop-it is not at hand, then the number of phonemes can be slammed.

Puppet conversation

Task to merge phonemes into words.

Put on a glove puppet and say that it speaks the puppet language - this will be a temporary name for English. Ask the children to translate what the toy says. For example:

Teacher (puppet voice): H-e-l-o. What does Mr Crocodile say? H-e-l-o?

Children: Hello!

I practice most of the tasks from the article at home with my three-year-old son. He does tasks on rhymes and tapping syllables himself, and he determines phonemes with my help.

I hope your students enjoy the games and help them take the first step towards learning to read.

You may also be interested in reading about games for the development of phonemic hearing in children

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Word games • Arzamas

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Author Lev Gankin

Primer “A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861

Oral games

Associations

Game for a big company. The host briefly leaves the room, during which time the rest decide which of those present they will guess (this may be the host himself). Upon returning, the player asks the others questions - what flower do you associate this person with, what vehicle, what part of the body, what kitchen utensils, etc. - in order to understand who is hidden. Questions can be very different - this is not limited by anything other than the imagination of the players. Since associations are an individual matter and an exact match may not happen here, it is customary to give the guesser two or three attempts. If the company is small, you can expand the circle of mutual acquaintances who are not present at that moment in the room, although the classic version of "associations" is still a hermetic game.

Game of P

A game for a company of four people, an interesting variation on the "hat" theme (see below), but does not require any special accessories. One player guesses a word to another, which he must explain to the others, but he can only use words starting with the letter "p" (any, except for the same root). That is, the word "house" will have to be explained, for example, as follows: "I built - I live." If you couldn’t guess right away, you can throw up additional associations: “building, premises, space, the simplest concept ...” And at the end add, for example, “Perignon” - by association with Dom Perignon champagne. If the guessers are close to winning, then the facilitator will need comments like “about”, “approximately”, “almost right” - or, in the opposite situation: “bad, wait!”. Usually, after the word is guessed, the explainer comes up with a new word and whispers it into the ear of the guesser - he becomes the next leader.

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Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861

Say the Same Thing

An upbeat and fast-paced game for two, named after a video clip by the inventive rock band OK Go, from which many people learned about it (the musicians even developed a mobile application that helps to play it from a distance, although it is currently unavailable). The meaning of the game is that on the count of one-two-three each of the players pronounces a randomly chosen word. Further, the goal of the players is, with the help of successive associations, to come to a common denominator: for the next time, two or three, both pronounce a word that is somehow connected with the previous two, and so on until the desired coincidence occurs. Suppose the first player said the word "house" and the second player said the word "sausage"; in theory, they can coincide very soon, if on the second move after one-two-three both say "store". But if one says “shop”, and the other says “refrigerator” (why not a sausage house?), then the game can drag on, especially since it’s impossible to repeat - neither the store nor the refrigerator will fit, and you will have to think, say, before "refrigerator" or "IKEI". If the original words are far from each other (for example, "curb" and "weightlessness"), then the gameplay becomes completely unpredictable.

Characters

A game for the company (the ideal number of players is from four to ten), which requires from the participants not only a good imagination, but also, preferably, a little bit of acting skills. As usual, one of the players briefly leaves the room, and while he is gone, the rest come up with a word, the number of letters in which matches the number of participants remaining in the room. Next, the letters are distributed among the players, and a character is invented for each of them (therefore, words that contain "b", "s" or "b" do not fit). Until the word is guessed, the players behave in accordance with the chosen character - the leader's task is to understand exactly what characters his partners portray and restore the hidden word. Imagine, for example, that a company consists of seven people. One leaves, the rest come up with a six-letter word "old man" and distribute roles among themselves: the first, say, will be with indoor, the second - t erpel, the third - a secondary, the fourth - p asylum, the fifth - and mane and the sixth - to ovary. The returning player is greeted by a cacophony of voices - the company "lives" their roles until they are unraveled, and the host asks the players questions that help reveal their image. The only condition is that as soon as the presenter pronounces the correct character - for example, guesses the insidious one - he must admit that his incognito has been revealed and announce the number of his letter (in the word "old man" - the sixth).

Recognize the song

A game for a company of four to five people. The host leaves, and the remaining players choose a well-known song and distribute its words among themselves - each word. For example, the song “Let there always be sun” is guessed: one player gets the word “let”, the second - “always”, the third - “will be”, the fourth - “sun”. The host returns and begins to ask questions - the most varied and unexpected: "What is your favorite city?", "Where does the Volga flow?", "What to do and who is to blame?". The task of the respondents is to use their own word in the answer and try to do it in such a way that it does not stand out too much; you need to answer quickly and not very extensively, but not necessarily truthfully. Answers to questions in this case can be, for example, “It’s hard for me to choose one city, but let today it will be Rio de Janeiro" or "Volga - into the Caspian, but this does not happen always , every third year it flows into the Black". The presenter must catch which word is superfluous in the answer and guess the song. They often play with lines from poetry rather than from songs.

Tip

A game for four people divided into pairs (in principle, there can be three or four pairs). The mechanics is extremely simple: the first player from the first pair whispers a word (a common noun in the singular) into the ear of the first player from the second pair, then they must take turns calling their associations with this word (in the same form - common nouns; cognate words cannot be used ). After each association, the teammate of the player who voiced it calls out his word, trying to guess if it was originally guessed - and so on, until the problem is solved by someone; at the same time, all associations already sounded in the game can be used in the future, adding one new one at each move. For example, suppose there are players A and B on one team, and C and D on the other. Player A whispers the word "old man" into player C's ear. Player C says aloud to his partner D: "age". If D immediately answers "old man", then the pair of C and D scores a point, but if he says, for example, "youth", then the move goes to player A, who, using the word "age" suggested by C (but discarding the irrelevant to the case "youth" from D), says to his partner B: "age, man." Now B will probably guess the old man - and his team with A will already earn a point. But if he says "teenager" (thinking that it is about the age when boys turn into men), then C, to whom the move suddenly returned, will say " age, man, eightieth birthday”, and here, probably, “old man” will be guessed. In one of the variants of the game, it is also allowed to "shout": this means that, having suddenly guessed what was meant, the player can shout out the option not on his turn. If he guessed right, his team will get a point, but if he rushed to conclusions, the team will lose a point. They usually play up to five points.

IPU

Game for a big company. Here we are forced to warn readers that, having seen this text in full, you will never be able to drive again - the game is one-time.

Spoiler →

First, the player who gets to drive leaves the room. When he returns, he must find out what MPS means - all that is known in advance is that the bearer of this mysterious abbreviation is present in the room right now. To find out the correct answer, the driver can ask other players questions, the answers to which should be formulated as “yes” or “no”: “Does he have blond hair?”, “Does he have blue eyes?”, “Is this a man?”, “He in jeans?", "Does he have a beard?"; moreover, each question is asked to a specific player, and not to all at once. Most likely, it will quickly become clear that there is simply no person in the room who meets all the criteria; Accordingly, the question arises, according to what principle the players give answers. "Opening" this principle will help answer the main question - what is MPS. The Ministry of Railways is not the Ministry of Communications at all, but m oy p equal s seated (that is, each player always describes the person sitting to his right). Another option is COP, to then to answered to last (that is, everyone talks about who answered the previous question).

Contact

A simple game that can be played with a group of three or more people. One thinks of a word (noun, common noun, singular) and calls its first letter aloud, the task of the others is to guess the word, remembering other words with this letter, asking questions about them and checking if the presenter guessed. The facilitator's task is not to reveal the next letters in the word to the players for as long as possible. For example, a word with the letter "d" is guessed. One of the players asks the question: “Is this by chance not the place where we live?” This is where the fun begins: the host must figure out as quickly as possible what the player means and say “No, this is not“ house ”” (well, or, if it was a“ house ”, honestly admit it). But in parallel, other players also think the same thing, and if they understand what “house” means before the leader, then they say: “contact” or “there is contact”, and start counting up to ten in chorus (while the count is going on, the presenter still has a chance to escape and guess what it is about!), and then they call the word. If at least two matched, that is, at the expense of ten they said “house” in chorus, the presenter must reveal the next letter, and the new guesser version will already begin with the now known letters “d” + the next one. If it was not possible to beat the host on this question, then the guessers offer a new option. Of course, it makes sense to complicate the definitions, and not ask everything directly - so the question about "home" would sound better like "Is this not where the sun rises?" (with a reference to the famous song "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals). Usually, the one who eventually gets to the searched word (names it or asks a question leading to victory) becomes the next leader.

Writing games

Encyclopedia

Not the fastest, but extremely exciting game for a company of four people - you will need pens, paper and some kind of encyclopedic dictionary (preferably not limited thematically - that is, TSB is better than a conditional "biological encyclopedia"). The host finds a word in the encyclopedia that is unknown to anyone present (here it remains to rely on their honesty - but cheating in this game is uninteresting and unproductive). The task of each of the players is to write an encyclopedic definition of this word, inventing its meaning from the head and, if possible, disguising the text as a real small encyclopedic article. The presenter, meanwhile, carefully rewrites the real definition from the encyclopedia. After that, the “articles” are shuffled and read out by the presenter in random order, including the real one, and the players vote for which option seems most convincing to them. In the end, the votes are counted and points are distributed. Any player receives a point for correctly guessing the real definition and one more point for each vote given by other participants to his own version. After that, the sheets are distributed back and a new word is played out - there should be about 6-10 of them in total. You can also play this game in teams: come up with imaginary definitions collectively. The game "poems" is arranged in a similar way - but instead of a compound word, the host selects two lines from some little-known poem in advance and invites the participants to add quatrains.

Game from Inglourious Basterds

A game for a company of any size that many knew before the Quentin Tarantino film, but it does not have a single name. Each player invents a role for his neighbor (usually it is some famous person), writes it on a piece of paper and sticks the piece of paper on his neighbor's forehead: accordingly, everyone sees what role someone has, but does not know who they are. The task of the participants is, with the help of leading questions, the answers to which are formulated as “yes” or “no” (“Am I a historical figure?”, “Am I a cultural figure?”, “Am I a famous athlete?”), to find out who exactly they are. In this form, however, the game exhausts itself rather quickly, so you can come up with completely different themes and instead of famous people play, for example, in professions (including exotic ones - "carousel", "taxidermist"), in film and literary heroes (you can mix them with real celebrities, but it’s better to agree on this in advance), food (one player will be risotto, and the other, say, green cabbage soup) and even just items.

Bulls and cows

A game for two: one participant thinks of a word, and it is agreed in advance how many letters should be in it (usually 4-5). The task of the second is to guess this word by naming other four- or five-letter words; if some letters of the named word are in the hidden one, they are called cows, and if they have the same place inside the word, then these are bulls. Let's imagine that the word "eccentric" is conceived. If the guesser says “dot”, then he receives an answer from the second player: “three cows” (that is, the letters “h”, “k” and “a”, which are in both “eccentric” and “dot”, but in different places). If he then says "head of head", he will no longer get three cows, but two cows and one bull - since the letter "a" in both "eccentric" and "head" is in the fourth position. As a result, sooner or later, it is possible to guess the word, and the players can change places: now the first one will guess the word and count the bulls and cows, and the second one will name his options and track the extent to which they coincide with the one guessed. You can also complicate the process by simultaneously guessing your own word and guessing the opponent's word.

Intellect

Writing game for the company (but you can also play together), consisting of three rounds, each for five minutes. In the first, players randomly type thirteen letters (for example, blindly poking a book page with their finger) and then form words from them, and only long ones - from five letters. In the second round, you need to choose a syllable and remember as many words as possible that begin with it, you can use single-root ones (for example, if the syllable "house" is selected, then the words "house", "domra", "domain", "domain", "brownie", "housewife", etc.). Finally, in the third round, the syllable is taken again, but now you need to remember not ordinary words, but the names of famous people of the past and present in which it appears, and not necessarily at the beginning - that is, both Karamzin and McCartney will fit the syllable "kar" , and, for example, Hamilcar. An important detail: since this round provokes the most disputes and scams, game participants can ask each other to prove that this person is really a celebrity, and here you need to remember at least the profession and country. Typical dialogue: "What, you don't know Hamilcar? But this is a Carthaginian commander!” After each round, points are counted: if a particular word is the same for all players, it is simply crossed out, in other cases, players are awarded as many points for it as the opponents could not remember it. In the first round, you can still add points for especially long words. Based on the results of the rounds, it is necessary to determine who took the first, second, third and other places, and add up these places at the end of the game. The goal is to get the smallest number at the output (for example, if you were the winners of all three rounds, then you will get the number 3 - 1 + 1 + 1, and you are the champion; less cannot be purely mathematical).

Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861

Frame

A game for any number of people, which was invented by one of the creators of the Kaissa chess program and the author of the anagram search program Alexander Bitman. First, the players choose several consonants - this will be the frame, the skeleton of the word. Then the time is recorded (two or three minutes), and the players begin to “stretch” vowels (as well as “й”, “ь”, “ъ”) onto the frame to make existing words. Consonants can be used in any order, but only once, and vowels can be added in any number. For example, players choose the letters "t", "m", "n" - then the words "fog", "cloak", "mantle", "coin", "darkness", "ataman", "dumbness" and other. The winner is the one who can come up with more words (as usual, these should be common nouns in the singular). The game can be played even with one letter, for example, "l". The words “silt”, “lay”, “yula”, “aloe”, “spruce” are formed around it, and if we agree that the letter can be doubled, “alley” and “lily”. If the standard "framework" is mastered, then the task may be to compose a whole phrase with one consonant: a textbook example from the book by Evgeny Gik - "Bobby, kill the boy and beat the woman at the baobab."

Chain of words

Game for any number of players. Many people know it under the name "How to make an elephant out of a fly", and it was invented by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice". The “chain” is based on metagram words, that is, words that differ by only one letter. The task of the players is to turn one word into another with the least number of intermediate links. For example, let's make a "goat" from a "fox": FOX - LINDE - PAW - KAPA - KARA - KORA - GOAT. It is interesting to give tasks with a plot: so that the “day” turns into “night”, the “river” becomes the “sea”. The well-known chain, where the "elephant" grows out of the "fly", is obtained in 16 moves: FLY - MURA - TURA - TARA - KARA - KARE - CAFE - KAFR - MURDER - KAYUK - HOOK - URIK - LESSON - TERM - DRAIN - STON - ELEPHANT (example of Evgeny Gik). For training, you can compete in the search for metagrams for any word. For example, the word "tone" gives "sleep", "background", "current", "tom", "tan" and so on - whoever scores more options wins.

Hat

A game for a company of four people, requiring simple equipment: pens, paper and a “hat” (an ordinary plastic bag will do). Sheets of paper need to be torn into small pieces and distributed to the players, the number of pieces depends on how many people are playing: the larger the company, the less for each. Players write words on pieces of paper (one for each piece of paper) and throw them into the "hat". There are also options here - you can play just with words (noun, common noun, singular), or you can play with famous people or literary characters. Then the participants are divided into teams - two or more people each; the task of each - in 20 seconds (or 30, or a minute - the timing can be set at your own choice) to explain to your teammates the largest number of words arbitrarily pulled out of the "hat", without using the same root. If the driver could not explain a word, it returns to the hat and will be played by the other team. At the end of the game, the words guessed by different representatives of the same team are summed up, their number is counted, and the team that has more pieces of paper is awarded the victory. A popular version of the game: everything is the same, but in the first round the players explain the words (or describe the characters) orally, in the second round they show in pantomime, in the third round they explain the same words in one word. And recently a board game has appeared, where you need not only to explain and show, but also to draw.

Telegrams

Game for any number of players. The players choose a word, for each letter of which they will need to come up with a part of the telegram - the first letter will be the beginning of the first word, the second - the second, and so on. For example, the word "fork" is selected. Then the following message can become a telegram: “The camel is healed. I'm flying a crocodile. Aibolit". Another round of the game is the addition of genres. Each player gets the task to write not one, but several telegrams from the same word - business, congratulatory, romantic (the types of messages are agreed in advance). Telegrams are read aloud, the next word is chosen.

even more different games for one or a company

Home games

Shadow theater, crafts and paper dolls from children's books and magazines of the XIX-XX centuries Ring and other games

Games from classic books

What do the heroes of the works of Nabokov, Lindgren and Milne play

Children's course on where games, jokes, horror stories and memes come from and why we need them

Children's room

Special project

Children's room Arzamas

Sources

• Balandin B.

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