The Kindergartner's Favorite Way to Learn to Spell: The Graham Cracker Game

Meghan, my favorite kindergartner, wants to have spelling homework every day now that she knows how to play graham cracker spelling games. She asks "Isn't it time for spelling?" Or "Don't forget I asked you to help me with spelling!" The kindergarten teacher at Meghan's school comes up with such fun, tactile, action-learning spelling games, we were inspired to come up with one of our own.

The Kindergartner's Graham Cracker Spelling Game, Week 1

Meghan brought her spelling sheet home with a list of her words for the week. She cut each word into a separate square, and spread the squares out. Her job was to choose any word on a square, and read it out loud. She picked "mother."

Next she counted the letters in the word "mother." Then she counted out six graham crackers (or three big ones split in half) and placed them side by side.

I had picked up a couple of small tubes of white gel frosting and I showed Meghan how to "write" in frosting. Her job was to copy each letter of the word mother onto a graham cracker by squirting the little frosting tube to make the letter. I helped her by guiding her hand at first, because it takes a little practice. Mistakes were no problem for Meghan though, because she could eat them. Soon, M-o-t-h-e-r was spelled out in shiny frosting. Meghan did all of her spelling words in this way. Fortunately, the other two words were shorter: day and my.

The next week, Meghan asked to do the Graham Cracker Spelling Game again, so we had to come up with another version.

The Kindergartner's Graham Cracker Spelling Game, Week 2

This version is very good for a list of short, simple words. First Meghan copied her three words: Her, is and us, on a piece of paper. Then she practiced reading and spelling the words by saying the word, clapping as she said each letter, and saying the word again. Once she succeeded with that step, we were ready to move on to version 2 of the Graham Cracker game.

Referring to her sheet of paper containing all three words, Meghan copied each letter of each word on a separate graham cracker using the gel frosting to "squirt and write." So we had seven crackers, one each for h, e, r; i, s; and u, s. The graham crackers were all lined up nicely, and Meghan easily read each word out loud. But then we mixed the graham crackers all up. As I spoke a word out loud, Meghan had to find the graham crackers with the right letters to spell the word. We did this for all the words.

We had a little test then as I spoke each word, and Meghan spelled it out loud without looking at the graham crackers. Since she got them all right, she got to make one more cracker using lots of frosting, and then eat it. She shared the other iced crackers with her brother and sister, who remarked that they didn't remember kindergarten being as much fun as Meghan seems to be having.

The Kindergartner's Graham Cracker Spelling Game Supplies

This is all you need:
Box of graham crackers
Small gel frosting tubes (In the baking needs section at the grocery)
Spelling words
Sheet of paper
Scissors

Source:
Personal experience