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DLTK's Holiday Activities for Kids
Summer themed Word Mining

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

Word Mining Tips

bulletSome 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:
bulletalphabetically:                 a a b d h h i p p r t y y
OR
bulletby consonants/vowels:   a a i y y     b d h h p p r t  
  
bulletTalk 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:

bulletWords that require a capital letter are not allowed (names like David or Sally)
  
bulletWords that are pluralized simply by adding an "s" are not allowed (cats, dogs, owls) though their singular is allowed (cat, dog, owl)
  
bulletWords that require punctuation are not allowed (ex:  can't, don't)
  
bulletTo 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

Printing the Template:

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

 

"Hot Summer Days" word mine template   color   or    B&W

 with letters rearranged alphabetically        color   or    B&W

  

"Let's Play Ball" word mine template          color   or    B&W

 with letters rearranged alphabetically        color   or    B&W

  

"Summer Sunshine" word mine template  color   or    B&W

 with letters rearranged alphabetically        color   or    B&W

  

 

Printable version of these instructions