We were playing scrabble today and I thought I’d quickly share our little hack. Funball has been playing for a while now, but at 8 years old, it’s still a challenge to keep up with an adult game. Daisy (5) is just learning to build words and having to play scrabble with a strange mix of all vowels or consonants would be impossible – and can be for many grown-ups!
So – we have a little hack to make our regular Scrabble game work for us. We sort the letter tiles into two piles. The vowels go face down on one side of the board, and the consonants go face down on the other side of the board.
We start the game with 3 vowels and 4 consonants. Every time we put a word down, we pick up the same type of tiles as we used. For example, if I was to play first and I played ‘BLUE’ I would then pick up two vowel tiles to replace the U and E, and two consonant tiles to replace B and L.
Super easy, completely free (assuming you already own the game!), solidifies which letters are vowels, and pretty much guarantees that even a beginning reader/writer can put down a CVC type word.
It also doesn’t baby the game down for adults. Yes, we get the advantage of an even mix of vowels/consonants, but we can still challenge ourselves to build longer words. So far, when we play with the kids, we don’t keep score, but we could if we wanted to.
Try it out!