Hobbies And Interests
Hangman
Hangman is a good example of a writing game that children can play because it is well-known and simple to learn. Children can take turns thinking of a word while others try to guess letters in the word. Slowly the children will write out a variety of words and, with adult supervision, might even correct a few spelling mistakes should bad spellings cause any troubles with guessing the word in question.
Letter Jumble Games
Letter-jumble games such as Boggle are good for children because they test both their analytical and spelling skills. A random assortment of letters must be re-arranged to spell as many words as possible in the time given. As an alternative to Boggle, you can write down a selection of vowels and consonants on a piece of paper for the children to create words from. The winner is decided by who gets the most or longest words. To give the game a more creative twist, tell the children that they can make up words from the jumble as long as they write a good description of what their word means.
Sentences and Word Order
The word order game for testing children's writing skills and word logic involves them writing a sentence and then jumbling up the syntax to see if the other children can rearrange the jumbled words back into the original sentence. Another variation of this game involves giving the children a page of sentences which have one vital word missing from it and getting them to guess the correct word to complete the sentence. For example, the missing word in the sentence "I went to the ------- store to buy some apples" would be "grocery."
Story Writing
Story writing will give the children a chance to demonstrate their creativity and writing skills. To add to the sense of fun, arrange it so each child in the group must contribute a word or sentence each. For example, child one would write "Once," then child two could write "upon," and so on. To add to the difficulty, you can instigate challenges such as denying them use of words that contain certain letters or adjectives and adverbs.
Consonant Game
To teach children about rhyme and rhythm, give them a normal word like "boat" and get them to write down as many variations of the word by swapping the first letter with one or more other letters. For example "boat" can become "goat," "moat" and "bloat." You can them get them to write a poem or even a rap using these words to rhyme with one another at the end of each line.