DLTK's Holiday Crafts for Kids
Spring Phrases Word Mining
Print out the template and make as many common words as you can from the phrase "April Showers" or the phrase "Springtime". This is good spelling practice for young children (and a challenge for adults too -- just ask my husband -- he's competed with Kaitlyn a few times to see who could come up with the most words... he won but it was close *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
- alphabetically:
a a b d h h i p p r t y y
- 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:
- After printing, close the template window to return to the main page.
- If the template doesn’t fit on one page, adjust your printer margins:
• In most browsers: Print → More settings → Margins → Minimum
• Or use Page Setup / Printer Setup in your printer dialog