Put your child’s irrational love of digging through junk mail to use in the Trashy Word Find Learning Game. You probably get your fair share of junk mail that you don’t really want to deal with. Instead of just tossing it in the trash can, let it help your child practice English and Language Arts skills. These skills include: Letter Recognition, Sight Words, Spelling, and Writing. Let’s check it out.
How to Play Trashy Word Find
Letter Recognition
This learning game can start out very simply with letter recognition practice. Just give your child a highlighter or colored pencil and a pile of mail and put them to work hunting down letters they know. Here are some variations:
- Highlight/circle the letters they know and underline letters they don’t know yet
- Highlight/circle vowels and underline consonants
As a bonus, your little one can tear open envelopes, which is a stupid amount of fun at that age.
Sight Words and Familiar Words
When your child is a little more advanced and is practicing sight words and other simple words, you can move up to this level. Have them highlight or circle any sight words or other words they know. Here’s a good, age-divided list of Sight Words.
Parts of Speech
If your child is getting into the nitty-gritty of sentence construction, you’ll want to make sure they can recognize the different Parts of Speech. Have them highlight or circle any nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. that they can find. If you’re like me, you might have a brain fart and forget all the Parts of Speech. There’s a good refresher of them for you on Grammarly.
Spelling and Writing
Do you ever get magazines sent to your house for people that don’t live there? We have a use for these too (Unless you’re planning to save that issue of Practical Sheep, Goats, and Alpacas for later).
You can turn the Trashy Word Find Learning Game into a bit of a craft with some clean printer paper, a glue stick, and some scissors.
We’re cutting out letters or words from magazines and gluing them onto some paper. You can give your child a list of words to spell or a sentence to write using pieces of your unwanted magazines. Again, please don’t have your child make ransom notes.
Wrapping Up
I hope this post gave you some good ideas to practice English and Language Arts in your homeschool. As an added bonus, maybe your child will learn what an APR is from all those credit card applications they keep sending!
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