Word Train Game

by Jessica Elliott-Lawrence on 01 Apr 2014

This game is a fantastic way to practise reading and spelling words. It’s also a great way to reinforce phoneme-grapheme recognition.

Set up

Print Train and Carriage Template
Photocopy one engine per child and five carriages per child
Cut out individually and laminate
Use a whiteboard marker to write one target grapheme on each carriage
Have the children sit in small groups with a hula-hoop in the centre of each group
You will need around 20 tokens per group
N.B. make sure you have more vowels than consonants

How to play

The dealer gives an engine and three carriages to each child. The remaining carriages are placed face down inside the hula-hoop.
The player to the dealer’s left starts. Have the child make a word with his or her carriages. If the child cannot make a word, turn a carriage over in the centre of the hoop to reveal a grapheme.
Ask the child again if a word can be made by swapping one of his or her carriages for the revealed grapheme carriage.
If the child chooses to swap a carriage to make a word, they must place the unwanted carriage face down in the hula-hoop.
He/she earns one token for making a word, and the child to the left takes a turn, following the same steps.
If the child cannot make a word with their new carriage grapheme, it is turned back over and no token is earned.
The player who has the most tokens wins.

To make the game harder, write a camera word on the long carriage, and have children make captions to earn a token, or add an extra carriage allowing them to make longer words.