Fun Language Arts Games

Fun language arts games are aimed at helping students improve and practice skills in reading, comprehension, spelling, vocabulary, writing, and composition. From classroom activities to online games children can do at home, there are many ways to make English studies fun.

The Crucial Need for Building Language Arts Skills

Building language arts skills is fundamental for students, particularly during elementary school. A foundation for communication and lifelong learning, language arts are a vital educational component of a student's successful future. While some students may enjoy these studies, other children may struggle with the subject area.

With this in mind, discovering ways to make language arts fun is important on many levels – from keeping students who already like the subject challenged and engaged to making the subject more interesting and easier to comprehend for those who struggle.

Language Arts Games for the Classroom

Teachers can easily supplement their curriculum with fun language arts games in the classroom. Obtain language arts game ideas from teacher forums or educational sites, or alter the format of a standard lesson to transform it into a fun game. Here are a few examples:

  • Dictionary Race: Great for elementary students to build vocabulary and familiarize themselves with using the dictionary, this game requires that the classroom has enough dictionaries for each student. The teacher gives a difficult word, and the students must race to find the definition. This game can be modified in many ways, such as giving points to students and having a final standoff among the top contenders or testing the students to see how well they remember the definitions.
  • Alphabetical Order Race: Divide the class into two teams. Give each team a group of identical index cards with words that need to be placed in alphabetical order, allowing one card for each person. As a team, have the students place the cards in alphabetical order. The team that finishes first wins.
  • Think Pink: This is a fun language arts game for students to practice using synonyms and adjectives. Students take turns, saying "think pink" for single vowel words or "thinky pinky" for words with two vowel sounds prior to their word choices. Other students must guess the correct set of words. For example: Hint: (Think Pink): Angry Father. Answer: Mad Dad. This game is also known as "Stink Pink," and an online version can be found at HighHopes.com.
  • Name that Part of Speech: Either as a class game or in small groups, students must identify as quickly as possible a given part of speech, whether verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, or interjection.
  • Missing Punctuation: Divide the class into two teams. Read a sentence aloud and have one child from each team write the sentence on the board including the correct punctuation. The team who writes it correctly first earns a point. The team with the most points wins.

Other popular games to use in the classroom to help students in language arts include:

  • Spelling games or spelling bees
  • Word searches
  • Crossword puzzles
  • Acrostics
  • Anagrams
  • Missing letter or fill-in games
  • Mad Libs
  • Choosing the correct word (commonly confused words)

A great resource for educators is Read. Write. Think. -- a site from the National Reading Association. There are over 50 interactive tools that teachers can use to create literacy and language arts games and activities for their classrooms. Houghton Mifflin's Eduplace also provides a variety of language arts textbook support tools, including interactive games, writing prompts, and printable games.

Board Games That Teach Language Arts Skills

Board games are still popular in both classrooms and at home. There are many classic board games that help build English skills, as well as specialized educational games for language arts. Classic choices and fun family games include:

  • Scrabble
  • Boggle
  • Upwards
  • Buzzword
  • Scribbage
  • Scattergories

Educational supply stores have various fun language arts board and card games to teach specific skills, such as Spelling All Stars, Word Pond, Grammar Mania, and Language Launch. Visit a store such as Educational Learning Games for selections.

Fun Language Arts Games Online

With computers becoming more available at both home and school, online language arts games are a great way to reinforce and practice language skills. Web sites with games that focus on building skills in reading, comprehension, writing, spelling, vocabulary and grammar include:

  • Primary Games Language Arts includes over two dozen fun, interactive games for children. Game skills include vowel sounds, plurals, vocabulary builders, and spelling.
  • Gamequarium has a selection of language arts games that includes fun games and activities to build dictionary and vocabulary skills, understand figurative language and punctuation, improve spelling skills, recognize sight words, and gain reading practice.
  • Fun Brain language games are categorized in an easy-to-use chart format that identifies which games work for which grade levels. From Spell-a-Roo to Paint-by-Idioms, there are choices for many ages.
  • I Know That language arts activities and games include fun sentence puzzles and word builders as well as wacky gems such as Punctuation Paintball and Scrambled Stories.