Looking for some fun word games to use with your child or class? They’re a great way to practise spelling and boost their vocabulary skills! Take a look at our top six favourite games below.

Bananagrams

This word game requires players to make as many words as they can from letter tiles in a crossword fashion. Players add one tile at a time which has to be added to a word. The winner is the first person to use up all their tiles. Be careful though! If you have any mistakes or unacceptable words, you will be deemed a “ROTTEN BANANA!” and will be out of the game.

Bananagrams is a great way of playing with words and encourages word recognition, spelling skills, letter recognition and language development. It’s great for ages 7+.

Scrabble Junior

Use your letters to form a word and place it on the board. The next player then adds his or her letters to the board, making a new word.

Players need to count their score, remembering to double or triple points if they manage to place a word across special spaces on the board.

Scrabble teaches children (and adults!) new vocabulary. It’s also very useful for looking at word-derivation – if I put “zoo” on the board, there is nothing wrong with adding the letters “KEEPER” or “LOGY” on the end to form new words. 

Play this game to learn the meanings of new words – and practise your score-keeping at the same time!

Articulate

This family favourite asks you to describe as many words as possible to the people on your team, without using any obvious hints such as “rhymes with” and “starts with”.

Make your way around the board by practising your descriptive skills!

Articulate requires children to decode the word on the card then offers lots of practice with synonyms and antonyms and gives children and adults alike the opportunity to develop their language and literacy skills.

Boggle

This simple word-search game can provide hours of fun! The grid shows you different letters, and you make as many words as you can by moving from one letter to another. You earn points for each word you create.

Boggle works brilliantly for shorter sessions, or for children with shorter attention spans. It gives them the opportunity for creative wordplay and reinforces language skills and vocabulary learning skills quickly and easily.

Fletter

This card game is fun, fast and addictive! You deal cards – which have a letter on and a points score – into the middle of the circle to show the letters.

The players all compete to try and be the first to make a word out of the letters being shown. If you shout the word out, you get to collect your cards and the accompanying points.

Fletter is fantastic for getting children to decode words and for checking spellings. It also encourages cognitive skills in quick thinking and concentration.

Story Cubes

Story Cubes arrive in a pack of 9. Simply shake them up and roll. Start with the phrase “Once upon a time…” and then look at the cubes to see which image first takes your fancy.

Using the other images being displayed, tell a story which links all of the icons together. The beauty of the

Story Cubes is that there is no right or wrong answer. Children can’t lose or get it wrong, but instead, they get to build their language and syntax skills as they try and weave a narrative. You could record what they say and if they want to have a go at writing or storyboarding their tale, they can!

Of course, if you have DoodleEnglish and DoodleSpell, you can check out our in-app games as well! Find Muddle and Hangman in DoodleSpell, or Word Search and X-Words in DoodleEnglish.

Happy Doodling!