Your kids have active minds, right? And sometimes those active minds need occupying. Well, once kids begin to learn about letters and words, it’s easy to keep them busy by playing with spelling!
This activity is great for your young spellers. It’s also a good thing to do while stuck in the car, because signs and billboards can certainly add to the fun here.
All your kids have to do is take any word and remove its first and last letters. Then they try to pronounce the word and see what they get.
Sometimes the answer is weird, often it’s gibberish, and frequently it’s rather funny! Sometimes you can find special, hidden meanings in the words.
When we recently played this in the car, my first grader saw a sign for a “school.” Well, without the first and last letters, you have not a school, but just a “choo.” We wondered: is a train involved here?
My younger son figured out that a dog is really just an “o.” Maybe that means we should call our dog by saying, “Oh, dog! Come here!”
A “prune,” we noticed, becomes a “run.” Hmmm. Interesting.
We also like to examine friends’ and family members’ names with this technique. Add and Omm are two prominent and popular figures in our house. (That’s Daddy and Mommy, in case you didn’t get it!) Our friend Chloe’s name becomes something that sounds quite like “Hello!” (Very friendly, we think.) But our friend Billy, well, we hope he feels better very soon.
I hope this activity is as much fun for your family as it is for ours. Be careful, though, sometimes words minus a first and last letter can be a bit objectionable. Such as when we recently saw a sign that featured the word, “speed.”
