5 Word Games to Improve Reading and Spelling Skills
If your child struggles with reading or spelling, you may be looking for some new and fresh ways to strengthen these skills. Yes, reading to your child is important. Spelling lists in school are important. But the reality is, for many kids the day-to-day practice they get at school is not enough to make them successful readers.
What Skills Do Reading and Spelling Require?
Both spelling and reading are complex tasks that require a variety of cognitive skills, including:
- Working memory (to hold onto information while in the process of using it)
- Auditory processing (the ability to take words apart and put them together effectively)
- Logic and Reasoning (understanding that because a certain word follows a reading or spelling rule, a similar word likely will too)
- Long-term memory (the fact is that English words are complex, and for many words we do just have to memorize their spellings)
These and other cognitive skills are foundational for successful reading and spelling. So what can you do to make them stronger?
While we recommend targeted, one-on-one brain training to address skill weaknesses in a more comprehensive way, playing games as a family is a great starting point to help your kids become stronger spellers and more confident readers.
Click here to learn more about how LearningRx brain training helps struggling readers and spellers.
Here are Some of Our Favorite Word Games (and Why We Love Them)
Bananagrams
Skills it helps: Spelling, processing speed, problem-solving
How to play it: Using letter tiles, form words in a Scrabble-like grid as quickly as you can. You can change letters around as needed to use them all.
Adaptations for struggling spellers and readers:
- Use smaller amounts of tiles (and chuck those Q’s and Z’s for a little while to get confident with more commonly used letters)
- Don’t worry about connecting your letters into a grid; just focus on making words
- Work as a team! Verbalize your thought process and get them to help you fill in missing sounds for each word as you go.
Dabble
Skills it helps: Planning, processing speed, spelling, logic & reasoning
How to play it: Using the 20 letter tiles that you draw, you need to make a 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 letter word before anyone else does.
Adaptations for struggling spellers and readers:
- Work with them, giving them the first letter of each word
- Start with just doing a 2- and 3-letter word. Work up from there as they grow in confidence!
- Again, work as a team. The more your child hears your thought process the more they will learn!
Boggle
Skills it helps: Visual processing, logic and reasoning, phonemic awareness, auditory processing, processing speed
How to play it: Using a grid of letters, find as many words as you can with letters that touch each other
Adaptations for struggling spellers and readers:
- Use a smaller grid and help them out with first letters
- Talk about strategy! Find common letter combinations, look for vowels and the letter “s” to make more common words
Mad Gab
Skills it helps: Strengthening phonetic awareness, reading phonetically, and auditory processing
How to play it: Players read a series of words on a card and the other members of your team need to guess what phrase it’s saying. For example, your card might say “Wall come island mash ooze” and the answer would be “Walk a mile in my shoes.”
Adaptations for struggling spellers and readers:
- Have them read it as they can, and then work together to target the sounds that you’re hearing
- Practice, practice, practice! This is a great game for building word manipulation skills, so the more you do it the easier it will be.
Zingo
Skills it helps: Building language skills, awareness of spelling patterns, and practice with common words
How to play it: This is a fun, fast-paced game that’s designed for early readers and spellers. They have versions to practice with building words, recognizing sight words, or building familiarity with bigger common words. Similar to Bingo but with a twist, your kids will love playing it!
Looking for More Games to Build Cognitive Skills?
Games are a great way to get smarter, think faster, and stay sharp. Check out this roundup of some of our family-game-night favorites!
Want a More Targeted Approach to Reading and Spelling Struggles?
We are here to help! Our brain training program brings an average of 3+ years’ improvement to cognitive skills and reading in a short amount of time.
While every program and outcome is different, we’d love to talk about how we can help give your kids the gift of successful, confident reading and spelling!
