Word Puzzles and Games: Hands-On Learning Stations

Words can be puzzling at times. If you have students that love to play with words, they will love solving puzzles that feature words. There are so many great resources for creating your own word puzzles, that the options are endless for creative fun stations.

I'm focusing on Language Arts this week in my 31+ Days of Hands-On Learning Stations series, and today is all about word puzzles and games.

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Stations with Word Puzzles 

There are so many amazing tools out there for creating your own word puzzles, that you could easily integrate any other material you are learning in a language arts station.

This would be a fun way to review the information you're studying. Think about:

  • Spelling words
  • Science vocab
  • Geography terms
  • Historical figures

Try out these cool tools:

  • Puzzlemaker: Crossword Puzzle generator. Once your crossword puzzle is generated, you need to copy and paste both the puzzle box and the clues into a word document in order to print it. This is such a fun tool though!
  • Word Search Puzzle Generator: Just set your difficulty level, type in your words, and the generator creates a professional looking word search with an answer key. If you're a member of their site, you can save your puzzles to edit again later.
  • Word Search Generator: This printable creation tool gives you the option of typing in your own list, or choosing from a list of common words. You can also make your word searches in various shapes like a circle, smile, train, diamond, or shamrock.

Stations with Word Games

I think that learning is only enhanced with games. There are so many fun ways to play with words. Here are some great word games:

Bananagrams are fun little letter tiles that you can make words with. Play it like scrabble without a board and see how many words you can connect. A greater challenge is to see if your kids could condense their playing board like the one below. Every middle tile needs to be a part of a word going vertical and horizontal. You could also just use scrabble letter tiles without the board to do something like this.

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Boggle is a classic word building game. Set it up at a station without the high pressure competition and timer, and let kids see how many words they can find in the letters. Mix it up and try to beat their last score.

If your kids are still younger, and not sure about spelling, Boggle Jr. is an awesome game for identifying the spelling of different words. The letter blocks are big and chunky, very fun for little hands.

These little owl short vowel sound sorters look like so much fun. You could easily recreate this game with some cups and pictures cut from magazines of animals, or this printable of three letter words.

Mad Libs

I have never met a kid who doesn't like a good mad lib. They are so funny. One of our favorite mad lib toys is our Grab-N-Gabs "Tell the Elf". The elf asks you questions, then records your voice into the story, but changes it to an elfish voice. We've had hours of fun with this!

You don't need any fancy toys to enjoy mad libs thought. Create your own here. Your kids might like a little bit of help with ideas for words in each part of speech. Download my helpful parts of speech reference sheet.

What word games to your kids like to play?

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Check out more hands-on learning stations inspiration in my 31+ Days of Hands-On Learning series! Check out these other Language Arts station ideas:

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