TWO WRITING TEACHERS
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Three Favorite Word Wall Games
A well-planned word wall allows students to quickly access familiar high frequency words from word study instruction. As they are writing, they can simply glance up, find the word, and continue to write. With the word wall, there’s no need to interrupt their work to search through a dictionary or booklet. Glancing at the word word wall is a great way for students to remember a familiar word and continue on with their work, reserving their energy for bigger and more important things.
The key to success with a word wall is that students can quickly find the words when they need them. If the word wall isn’t used often, or is too far away to be seen easily, then students are back to searching for the word they need instead of scanning quickly.
One engaging way to help students become familiar with the word wall in your own classroom is to play quick word wall games daily. These games get students reading the words and familiarizing themselves with where each word is located. Here are three of my all time favorites:
GUESS THE WORD
To play this game, the teacher gives clues, and the students guess which word. You might say, “I’m thinking of a word with three letters,” or “I’m thinking of a word with two vowels,” or “I’m thinking of a word that begins with a digraph.” These clues get students reading the whole word wall searching for the one word that fits the clues. Once the game is familiar, you can also invite students to give clues to a word.
This is a simple game, but super engaging. Turn out the lights, and point a flashlight or laser pointer at your word wall and kids spell and read the word (or cheer for the word if you’ve taught them how to do that). You can read them in order from A-Z, or backward from Z-A, or skip around and try to “trick” the kids. Silly, but effective. I like to use it as a quick transition for lining up to leave the room — as each group takes a few turns reading words, they line up. This game gets students rereading the words on the word wall in an engaging way.
MISSING WORD
Remove a word (or two or three) from the word wall, and students take turns guessing which word is missing. They can ask questions to get clues such as, “Does it begin with ____?” or “Is it a verb?” Sometimes they guess right away, other times it takes a little longer. This game gets student reading the whole word wall to figure out which one is missing.
There are zillions of other games you can play with the word wall. Some are designed to help student recognize individual words on sight, other games help students use the words they know to spell other words. The games listed here help students familiarize themselves with where the words are located, so that when they are writing, the can glance up at the word wall quickly to find the word and recall how to spell it.
For more word wall ideas, see this post from October.
What are your favorite word wall games? Share below!
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Published by BethMooreSchool
Literacy Coach, Consultant, Author, Graduate Course Instructor, and Mom. Passionate about fostering a love of reading and writing in learners of all ages. View all posts by BethMooreSchool
6 thoughts on “ Three Favorite Word Wall Games ”
I’m familiar with Word Wall, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of using all these games. I know many teachers introduce Word Walls when they begin a new unit. Would you usually play the games at the beginning, during, or at the end of a unit?
Hi Melanie! Thanks for your question. The word wall I’m referring to is for learning high frequency words (e.g. the, and, because). These little games are meant to be daily, or at least frequently. The purpose is to learn the words with automaticity, on sight, so daily practice is helpful for that.
I use the laser pointer all the time. I sometimes point at words in anchor charts, shared reading easel, or other pertinent print around the room, too. And with a laser pointer you don’t even have to turn the lights out– they get pretty fast at finding that little red light spot. I found the cheapest laser pointers at ACE Hardware, of all places– $4 ! Laser pointers are for teachers only, remember.
Love searching the room (and books) for word wall words–another fave word wall game. Word hunts!
Love all these ideas! I used to have vocab. words on the word wall in 2nd grade and we’d play word wall charades–the kids would take turns acting out a word–always very funny!
Great idea 🙂
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Word wall "active-ities" build vocabulary, spelling, writing skills.
A classroom word wall has many uses. A wide variety of activities and games can be used to help reinforce vocabulary words that appear on the wall. Included: Five activities shared by teachers who use word walls in their classrooms.
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Find hundreds of interactive activities to teach and practice problem solving skills in various subjects and levels. Browse examples from the Wordwall community or create your own with Wordwall's easy-to-use tools.
Problem Solving Situations Ruota della fortuna. di Hnelson1. Kindergarten 1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade Social studies. Problem Solving Scenarios 01 Quiz. di Angelesb. Problem Solving Telequiz. di Janeruocco2. Spin the wheel: problem solving Ruota della fortuna. di Elizabeth386.
Wordwall makes it quick and easy to create your perfect teaching resource. Pick a template; Enter your content; Get a pack of printable and interactive activities
These reference sheets displays all of the key words to look for when solving a word problem. Students can easily find the key words to evaluate the word problem and identify the operation needed to solve.
Remove a word (or two or three) from the word wall, and students take turns guessing which word is missing. They can ask questions to get clues such as, “Does it begin with ____?” or “Is it a verb?” Sometimes they guess right away, other times it takes a little longer.
A classroom word wall can spark an unending variety of activities. Here we've highlighted just a few. FIVE WORD WALL ACTIVITIES PROVIDE FUN AND LEARNING. Click each of the five lesson headlines below for a complete teaching resource.
In this post, I want to share the digital updates every one of my word walls has recently gotten. Clicking on a digital math word wall. I decided to use real photographs to build the digital word walls so that each word wall would feel as much like a real math classroom as possible.
Support your students’ understanding of problem solving skills in mathematics with this clue word wall kit. As your students begin to solve word problems, use this kit to provide a reference of clue words that will help students identify which method of operation is necessary to solve. This kit prov. Subjects: Basic Operations, Word Problems.
Wordwall makes it quick and easy to create your perfect teaching resource. Pick a template; Enter your content; Get a pack of printable and interactive activities
Here are 6 ways to use interactive math word walls to help your students understand the terms and retain their academic vocabulary. 1) Create sentence stems for your students. Sentence stems can help in forming a true understanding of the vocabulary. Have your students use them to complete the sentence their own definition.