Word Games and Spelling Help for Teachers

If you have five minutes

For spelling

Most spelling mistakes fall into a few kinds, and each kind has its own fix. Our list of commonly misspelled words groups 198 of the misspellings people search for most by the mistake, and each word has a page with the reason and a way to remember it. The three kinds people search for most:

• Double letters: accommodate, quizzes, mattress
• A letter left out: background, surprise, environment
• The wrong vowel: separate, grammar, genealogy

For practice, What's your word worth? has students write each spelling word out and add up its letter values: a reason to look at every letter.

For math

• Addition with letters: every letter has a value, so every word is a sum. What's your word worth? (grades 2 to 5) works with any word list.
• Adding and ranking: Score the states (grades 3 to 6) has students score 12 state names, then rank them, with an answer key. The full list is on the Scrabble score of every state.
• Graphing: What's your name worth? ends with a class bar graph of everyone's name score.
• Frequency and percentages: Scrabble tile values, recalculated shows how often each letter appears in today's word list, and what each tile would be worth by that measure.

For data lessons

Each study comes with its data as a spreadsheet, so students can check the findings or ask their own questions.

For holidays and class parties

• Word searches: Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving puzzles at three levels, each with an answer key, and more themes.
• Banners and word walls: printable letters, a big tile or an outline letter per page.
• Name tags: the Scrabble name generator turns every name in the class into tiles to print.

For a club or game day

Print a board, a set of tiles and score sheets from our free Scrabble printables (13 sheets, including all 107 two-letter words for the wall), and see whether a Scrabble club near your school welcomes young players.