Learning with Scrabble: Games and Prompts for Toddlers

I don't know about you guys, but I happen to love a good, old-fashioned family game night. One of the exciting things that my husband and I looked forward to about starting a family was having a reason to play all of our favorite childhood board games. 

We have been known to engage in a pretty heated game of Monopoly back in the day. Of course, with most board games, there has to be a certain level of awareness and understanding that can only come with age. Needless to say, we haven't had much luck playing Monopoly or Yahtzee with our three-year-old and one-year-old (nor had we really tried) but when our oldest, DG, expressed interest in playing Scrabble, my inner teacher was willing to see how we might tweak the game to be fun for toddlers. 

So, here's how that went.

Fair warning, we're still finding Scrabble tiles under the train table. Another warning, the tiles in the classic Scrabble game are probably better to play with. We have the Birchbox edition, which is more of a "travel sized" game and the tiles are about the size of my pinky finger nail. Luckily my kids are past the stage of putting interesting objects into their mouths. 

Prompt #1: Reach in, pull out a Scrabble tile, and name the letter on it. Sounds simple enough, right. It is. Painfully simple, but really a fun game of surprises for two toddlers. 

Prompt #2: Match the letter. We used our story time rug and alphabet banner to match, but you could use books, flash cards, foam letters, or even alphabet magnets to match up with the Scrabble tile letter. 

Prompt #3: Spell my name. This game is a little more tricky, so it was one that I played with DG while his brother was napping. It would definitely not suit a one-year-old's attention span. With this one, we took turns pulling letters out of the bag and DG had his name template "David" in front of him. We then played a version of "Go Fish" pulling out letters, and swapping, until we could each spell our names. 

Prompt #4: Match and spell. This is one that we played just as a mommy and DG team sport more than anything. We would pick a surprise letter out of the bag and match it with our alphabet banner (for example, P for pig) and spell that word. He had to find the missing letters (i, g) and then put them in order on the game board to match the word on our banner. 

Prompt #5: The kids make up the rules and play however they please with the game pieces. There is very little "direct" educational value to this prompt except for the fact that they are seeing letters! However, I did hear DG delight in finding letters that he knew and pretending to spell some words, so it's definitely worthwhile. Even though I have been rescuing Scrabble tiles from the vacuum cleaner ever since. ;)  

With the success of our fun adventures in modifying and watering down Scrabble, I have some delightful (IMO) ideas to modify more of our collection of grown-up games, too. Stay tuned! :)