DLTK's Holiday Crafts for Kids
"Merry Christmas" Word Mining

Print out the template and make as many common words as you can from the phrase "Merry Christmas".  This is good spelling practice for young children (and a challenge for adults too -- just ask my partner -- he had to help me with the sample answers sheet *wink*).

Word Mining Tips

• Some people find it useful to rearrange the letters they have available in alphabetical order or grouped by consonants and vowels before they start mining.
   
  For example, if your word mining phrase is "Happy Birthday" you might find it useful to rearrange the letters:
  • alphabetically:                 a a b d h h i p p r t y y
    OR
  • by consonants/vowels:   a a i y y     b d h h p p r t
• Talk to the children about using "rhymes" to help fill in more words.  For example, if you find the word Rat (using "Happy Birthday" as our word mining example) encourage the children to replace the first letter (R) in Rat with some of the other consonants available to come up with Bat, Hat, Pat, THat 

Word Mining Rules:

• Words that require a capital letter are not allowed (names like David or Sally).
• Words that are pluralized simply by adding an "s" are not allowed (cats, dogs, owls) though their singular is allowed (cat, dog, owl).
• Words that require punctuation are not allowed (ex:  can't, don't).
• To make word mining more challenging, you can also disallow 1, 2 and 3 letter words.  However, if you're doing this with younger children I recommend allowing them to form words with as many letters as they like.

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).

"Merry Christmas" word mine template           color   or    B&W

 with letters rearranged alphabetically             color   or    B&W

example answers (not all inclusive, but gives a good sampling)     answers

Printable version of these instructions

Christmas word scramble puzzles for kids

printable Christmas itsy bitsy books for kids to color and fold