How I play with my grandkids and get them to learn at the same time! Fun with words

During the summer, parents may want to keep their children focused on something other than using their phones or watching television. One way to help children have fun and learn at the same time is to play word games. I played word games with my grandsons, where I would give them a word or mixture of letters. Then they had to find as many words as possible.

Typically, I would give a 5-letter word and ask them to find as many 3-letter, 4-letter and 5-letter words, only using those letters and not duplicating any letter.

My favorite word was “earth”. You can get over 25 different words from those 5 letters. For example, some of the over a dozen 3-letter words embedded in “earth” are: art, eat, rat, the, and hat. Of the many 4-letter words, a few are heat, rate and tear. There are also a few 5-letter words including heart and hater.

Depending on the age of the child, you can present the word spelled correctly, or you can mix up the letters, which often provides a greater challenge. Here are some examples: a 5-letter word, r-c-k-b-i; or a 4-letter word, w-s-n-o. They do not have as many possible words, but unscrambling the letters is usually very enjoyable.

Another fun game is to use a “marsupial” or “kangaroo” word. This is a word that has other words in it. You can drop letters but cannot move any of the letters around. One example often cited is “encourage”. It contains 12 different words. A few of them are courage, core and rage.

A couple of other word games, which are more suited for older children are anadrome and pangrams. An anadrome is actually two words—meaning two words can be found by reading the word frontward and backward. For example: “stressed” can be read backward as “desserts”.

A pangram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. One should try to avoid repeating the same letters too often. One of the oldest examples is “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.”

Nancy Neal Yeend is a local grandmother, a retired Realtor, and mediator/dispute management strategist. She enjoys going to parks, identifying birds and visiting memory care facilities with her Therapy Dog, Wolfie.