This year my daughter has been working her way through a spelling development program called Words Their Way. If you are not familiar with Words Their Way I highly suggest you check it out. It is an awesome program for helping kids work on their phonics, vocabulary, and spelling in a way that goes further than just memorization. This game of Word Families Lego Sort is one of the many activities that we do to work on her Words Their Way weekly spelling list.
When children sort words in games such as this they are engaged in the process of searching, analyzing, comparing, and contrasting. These problem solving skills help teach children how to form generalizations that can be applied when they come across new words that they may not know.
Items Needed for Word Families Lego Sort
- Printable Spelling List (if you are not using a Words Their Way list you can find free printable spelling cards on our Stamp and Spell post).
- Mega Bloks (buy here)
- Duck Tape (buy here)
- Dry Erase or Washable Marker (buy here)
- Scissors (buy here)
How to Play
Have your child cut out their word list while you label each Mega Blok with duck tape. The duck tape can act like a dry erase board for your spelling words allowing your child to reuse the Legos for new words. Once all the blocks are labeled and words cut out have your child write their spelling words, one per block.
Across the top of your play area place your labels for the word families. Below create two piles – cut out spelling words and Legos.
To help Livia grasp the concept I helped her start her board with one word per section explaining what made that word qualify to be a part of that family.
It didn’t take her long to dive right in and get building!
Once she had made her way through all of the blocks we pulled out the second pile of her cut out spelling words. For this part of the game she matched each cut out word to their corresponding Lego.
This was a super fun and simple way to work on spelling words!