Letter Tile Ideas for Teaching Phonics

No matter the age of your student, it's fun to intermix playing games with other literacy activities.

Bananagrams is a spelling game featuring a banana shaped zippered pouch and Scrabble type alphabet letter tiles. It is easy and convenient to carry along.

The basic game is to place letter tiles face down and participants pick a number of tiles and they take turns adding to the crossword puzzle that they are making. The instructions will give more details and various options for ways to play the game.

With the letter tiles, you can also come up with your own variations. For instance, you could have your student practice making words that start with a certain blend, or make rhyming words that have the same spelling on the end of the word.

I am sure that you can come up with other ideas as well.

Some ideas are:

1. Scramble the letters of a particular word, say the word, then have the student rearrange the letters to spell the word correctly.

2. Lay a variety of letter tiles to choose from, then start the word with a letter blend, say the word, then have the student complete the spelling of the word.

3. Lay the letter tiles out to represent various blends, i.e. bl, cl, fl, etc. Say a word and have the student select the correct spelling for the beginning blend.

4. Lay the letter tiles out to represent various blends, i.e. br, cr, dr, etc. Place letter tiles in place to spell the remainder of a word. Have the student select the correct blend and have them place the correct tiles in front of the letters that make a word.

A small set is plenty enough tiles for a couple of people to play a variety of spelling games.

5. Make a crossword puzzle. Lay various letter tiles out, and spell a word with the tiles. Have the student think of a word that includes a letter that you have already used, and they can add their tiles to the crossword puzzle. Alternating turns, keep using letters that are already in the puzzle to be part of the new word.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to use letter tiles to help reinforce learning.

If you don't already have letter tiles from an old Scrabble game, then I recommend Bananagrams; it comes with a storage bag to easily carry your letters and it's small enough to fit in a purse or backpack.


If you have other spelling ideas to use letter tiles, please share them with us below.

Cheryl Paton

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