5 Fun Word Games for Improving Literacy

Help students grasp key literacy concepts by incorporating games into your practice. Word games and reading games can be powerful ways to build literacy skills. Try these simple games anytime to get the whole class excited about reading!

Why Is Literacy Important?

Building literacy empowers students in myriad ways because literacy is the cornerstone of the educational foundation. Literacy skills are critical to development. A student’s ability to read, write, speak, and understand language allows them to communicate, succeed, and navigate the world. Literacy skills are associated with better health, emotional stability, and economic opportunity. Teaching literacy is a great gift because it enables students to gain knowledge and achieve their goals.

How Do Games Help Build Literacy Skills?

Games make learning to read stress-free. In one way or another, almost any game requires reading, spelling, and comprehension; and many games tell stories or utilize fluency that resembles reading. It’s widely documented that children learn faster with games than they do with traditional instructional methods.

Games also show kids that reading is more than just words on a page – reading is part of interacting and doing things. Instead of asking students to sit still and struggle through something discouraging, games give kids the chance to do something relaxing, joyful, and hands-on while actually using words to participate in the game. Playing games helps kids focus attention, absorb and remember information, and apply new concepts.

How Do Word Games Help Kids Learn Literacy?

Here are a few examples! Bingo-style games help kids visually match the way words look with how they sound. Boggle-style games are perfect hands-on practice for reading, spelling, and sounding out words. Scrabble-style games enable students to connect words to each other, building the spatial awareness needed for reading (because words can only be formed in certain directions) and reinforcing spelling skills. Bananagrams-style games help students learn about letter combinations and build vocabulary.

5 Fun Literacy Activities

These ideas are simple, creative ways for students to have fun building literacy skills through game-based practice.

1. Nature Story: Take students on a walk through a local park. Bring clipboards, paper, and pencils. Ask students to record what they see and then write a story about it, draw pictures and label them, or describe objects, plants, and animals with imaginary personalities. Students can share their creations in a show-and-tell or teachers can collect them all into a book. If you like, ask students to come up with as many adjectives as they can to describe what they saw or experienced.

2. Scavenger Hunt: Choose a book everyone in the class wants to read. Each player reads a passage from the book for clues about where to search for items (hidden in advance by the teacher) and the group pursues the clues until discovering a grand prize at the end (which could be food-related!) to reward their reading. You can even combine this game with the nature story, and ask students to collect items on the hunt, like rocks, flowers, or leaves.

3. Word Search: Give student a page from a magazine or a newspaper and a list of words. Then have them find and circle all the words. Younger children who are learning to read can circle words that begin with certain letters. Award prizes when students complete their lists, or allow them to level up to a different game.

4. Rhyming Sounds: Start with a word and ask students to say words that rhyme. Or choose a sound and have students come up with words that contain that sound. Or choose books packed with entertaining rhymes and ask kids to point out the rhyming words and come up with other words the rhyme. Add rhyming words to lists and see who can make the longest list with the most rhymes, or have students write their own songs using rhyming words.

5. Reading Aloud: Try a reading game in which everyone takes turns, so that each student alternates reading a paragraph or a page. This activity is surprisingly effective for keeping students engaged in a story or book. It also requires each reader to expand their vocabulary and learn to pronounce any new words. If the teacher prefers to read the whole story, pausing during reading to talk with students about what’s happened so far and what might happen next is also a powerful method for engaging students in the reading process. This can be made into a game by creating teams and tracking which team remembers the most details or accurately predicts what comes next.

Reading brings students a lifetime of opportunity, joy, and learning. By providing young readers with the strong foundation of literacy, educators give them the chance to become successful in life. Games like these are a great way to show students how much fun reading can be.