Spelling games and activities

Classroom Spelling Games for Grades 2-6

Looking for an engaging spelling game to play with your students? Look no further! We’ve collected together a fun list of classroom spelling games suitable for students in grades two to six.

1. Buzz Off Spelling Game
Have students stand in a circle. Choose a person to start and say the word to spell. In succession moving from person to person around the circle, each student says the next letter in the word until the entire word is spelt. The next student says ‘buzz’ and then the next ‘off’ and that final student sits down. Any student whose letter misspells the word also has to sit down. Keep playing until only one student remains standing.

2. Spelling Team Tic Tac Toe #1
Divide students into two teams. Draw a large tic tac toe grid on the whiteboard. Students from each team take turns to orally spell an allocated word correctly. If they are correct, they add an x or o to the grid for their team. First team to three in a row wins the round.

3. Spelling Team Tic Tac Toe #2
Divide students into two teams. Draw a large tic tac toe grid on the whiteboard. Give each team a different coloured whiteboard marker. Students from each team take turns to spell an allocated word directly onto their choice of square on the tic tac toe grid. If they spell the word incorrectly it is erased. First team with three correctly spelled words in a row wins the round.

4. Snowball Spelling Game
Onto a small sheet of white paper write the grapheme for a sound the class has been studying, e.g. ‘ir.’ Scrunch the paper up into a ball. Throw the paper ball to a child who must unwrap the paper and say a word containing that sound. The child then throws the paper ball to another child who has to spell the word. They then throw the ball to another child who has to say a sentence that includes the word. They then throw the ball to another child who starts the sequence again with a new word that includes the sound.

5. Spelling Swat It!
Divide students into two teams. Write the spelling words randomly onto the whiteboard.

Stand the first two players, with their backs to the board, a short distance in front of it. Give them each a plastic fly swat.

Call out a clue to identify the spelling word. For example, “This word means…” or “Rhymes with …” The two players must then race to be the first to swat the correct word on the board. The winner must then turn away from the board and spell the word correctly to win a point for their team.

6. Spelling Word Relay
Divide the students into teams. Each team lines up a short distance away from the whiteboard, facing the board. The first person in each team starts with a whiteboard marker.Call a word for the students to spell. The first student in each team races to the board and writes the first letter of the word and then runs back to pass the marker on to the next team member who writes the next letter of the word, and so on. Team members can correct an incorrect letter on their turn but they may not add a new letter. The first team to correctly spell the word scores a point.7. Spelling Who Am I?
Write each spelling list word onto a post-it note. Divide students into two teams. The first student from the first team sits on a chair at the front of the room, facing the rest of her team. Place the first post-it note onto the student’s forehead. The goal is for the chosen student’s teammates to give him or her clues to what the word on his forehead is, without revealing the word directly. They can use rhyming words, synonyms, antonyms, guestures, etc. After they guess the word correctly, the student then has to spell the word. If they spell the word correctly, they score a point for their team. Repeat with the first team member from the second team, and so on.

8. Unscramble
Line students up into two or three teams facing the class whiteboard. The first person in each team has a personal whiteboard and a whiteboard marker and an eraser and turns to face away from the class whiteboard. Write a jumbled version of the first spelling word on the class whiteboard. On ‘Go!’ the team members turn to face the board. The first of these students to write the unjumbled word (spelled correctly) onto their personal whiteboard and holds it up to the teacher wins a point for their team. They then pass the whiteboard onto the next team member and play continues with a new jumbled word for each round.

9. Missing Letters
Played in the same manner as Unscramble but the words are written onto the classroom whiteboard with blank lines in the place of some of the letters. For example, b_c_ _se for the word because.

10. Invisible Man
Line students up into two teams facing the whiteboard. Draw two large stick people on the whiteboard, one in front of each team, each must have the same number of body parts. Call out a word for the first member of team one to spell. If they spell it correctly they may erase one body part from the other team’s stick person. Call out a word for the first member of team two to spell, and continue on until one team’s stick person is completely erased. The erasing team is the winner!

11. Spell-O
Each student chooses five spelling words and writes them onto a piece of paper. Write the alphabet in large print across the whiteboard. Cross out the letters of the alphabet, one by one. As each letter is crossed out, students cross out that same letter as it appears in each of their own words. First student to cross out all of the letters in all of their words wins.

12. Dictionary Challenge
This game works best with students in the upper elementary/primary grades. Divide students into teams. Each team will need a dictionary. Students choose a player from their team to go first. Call out a word. The elected students from each team race to be the first to find the word in the dictionary. The person who succeeds scores a  point for their team. The dictionary is then passed to the next person in each team and the process repeated.

Christie Burnett is a teacher, presenter, writer and the mother of two. She created Childhood 101 as a place for teachers and parents to access engaging, high quality learning ideas.

Help

Problem: The website is blocked to my students

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Copy the sharing code (see the section below about sharing lists), and paste it inside a text document (such as MS Word or Google Docs). Type your title above it. You can paste this way as many lists as you wish. Save the document.
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Problem: A game stopped working (can't hear sound, or the screen is black, or doesn't load)

Note that old computers (older than 4 years) might have trouble running some of the games.

Solutions:
1. Try reloading the page (use the "reload" button on the browser, or the F5 key on the keyboard).
Does it work now? If it doesn't, then try the following:

2. Close the browser, including all its open tabs (better save your word list before closing). If you can, close other computer programs that are open too.
Now wait a few seconds (to let the computer's memory get flushed).
Now open the browser again, get back into spellingtraining.com, go to the problematic page and reload it again.

If it still doesn't work, then:
3. Try the website with another browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, etc.). If it doesn't work with one - it might work with the other.

If it still doesn't work - please tell me about it! Send me an email to: [email protected]
But also in the meantime, the following solution will probably work -
4. Try using the website from another computer.

Problem: Some games are suddenly missing (Rollercoaster, Dragon)

Solution: If you browse from a computer and this happens, try the following:
1. Maximize the browser's window size. The games might now reappear.
2. Try zooming out by clicking "Ctrl" with "-" (pressing Ctrl with the minus key). If you zoom out the missing games will appear.
Note that those 3d games (rollercoaster, dragon island, jungle speller etc.) won't appear on tablets and smartphones.

I didn't find an answer to my problem

If there is anything else that you need assistance with, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll do my best to help you. My email is [email protected]

45 games and game exercises in the Russian language lessons to develop and correct the attention of 2nd grade students with mental retardation

Sections: Russian language, Primary school, Correctional pedagogy, Inclusive education

Attention occupies a special place among mental phenomena, acting as an integral part of cognition, feelings and will. It plays a significant role in the regulation of intellectual activity, allowing you to concentrate and direct the consciousness of a student at a given moment of time on some real or ideal object - an object, phenomenon, event, image, thought, etc. nine0005

Primary schoolchildren aged 8-9 with mental retardation (MPD) have unstable attention. This instability manifests itself in different ways. In some children, at the beginning of the task, there is maximum concentration for them, which steadily decreases as the activity continues, and the student begins to make mistakes or completely stops performing the task. For others, the greatest concentration of attention occurs after a certain period of performing specified actions, and then gradually decreases. There are children who have periodic fluctuations in attention. The possibilities of volitional regulation of attention, control of it in children above this category are limited. nine0013

The variability of deviations in the development of junior schoolchildren with mental retardation has a wide range: children of the same age are at different stages of development of speech, sensory-perceptual and mental activity, they have spatio-temporal representations formed to varying degrees, they have a different stock of knowledge about the environment the world.

The listed developmental deficiencies are successfully compensated for with directed and systematic work on educational material under the guidance and with the help of an adult. nine0005

Of great importance for the correction and development of voluntary attention at primary school age for students with mental retardation is the game, on which the teacher must rely as the leading activity of the child with mental retardation, but saturate the game with didactic rules so that the child needs mental stress. In turn, didactic games have a task, rules, actions and require concentration. In order to develop in students certain qualities of attention (purposefulness, stability, concentration) and the ability to manage them, we have developed game exercises based on the program content in the Russian language for students with second-grade mental retardation. nine0005

When developing games and game exercises, we used methodological recommendations for the development of attention by A. A. Osipova, L.N. Blinova, for the organization of assistance to a poorly performing student N.P. Lokalova, for teaching the Russian language to younger students with mental retardation С .G.Shevchenko.

For convenient use in work, games and game exercises were distributed by us according to the studied content lines of the subject area "Russian language": "Language system" (phonetics and graphics, morphemic, morphology, syntax), "Spelling and punctuation" and "Speech development ". nine0005

The developed complex of games and game exercises is aimed at providing timely psychological and pedagogical assistance to children with mental retardation and is designed to develop attention and improve the quality of mastering the content of educational material in the Russian language lessons and correctional and developmental classes for students with mental retardation 8-9 years old.

Practical significance: the materials of this work can be used by elementary school teachers, psychologists, speech pathologists to work with children of primary school age to develop their attention properties and improve the quality of teaching in the Russian language. nine0005