Two Fun Word Games for Children: "Word Work" and "Painful Poetry"

If you are looking for some fun ways to encourage your children to write and to use their vocabulary, I can recommend the following two word games taken from a 1958 teen activities book. These could be played in the car or at home for an evening's entertainment or as a homeschooling activity.

How to Play the Word Game "Word Work"
This game encourages children to make words that begin and end with certain letters. The parent or game leader should pick a word at least six or more letters long. Give each child a piece of ruled (lined) paper and a pen or pencil and have the child write the word down (vertically) on the left hand side and in reverse order down the right hand side. The player is then told to fill in the spaces with letters between the letters they already have to make as long a word as possible. For example, say the leader chose the word "CHILDREN." The players would have to try to make a word that begins with C and ends with N, a word that begins with H and ends with E, a word that begins with I and ends with R, and so on for a total of eight words. The children and/or leader would need to decide whether or not proper names and places were allowed. For large groups, you can have the children play in teams of two. Once everyone has finished, score each paper by assigning a point for each letter used. The player or team with the highest number of points wins.

How to Play the Word Game "Painful Poetry"
This writing game is a version of the old "Consequences" game or the more recent version "Who, What, When, Where, Why" which I've seen played in current homeschooling circles. While "Word Work" could be played by a single child, "Painful Poetry" needs at least three or more children or players to really be entertaining. The purpose of this game is to write the most awful, tongue twisting hilarious poetry you can imagine by having multiple people work on the poem in sequence. The pattern I will be sharing should generate poetry with alternating rhyming stanzas. (Variations of this pattern could be used to generate different kinds of rhyming poetry.)

To play this writing game give each player a piece of paper and a pen or pencil and have them write a line of poetry on the top line (without letting anyone else see it). Next fold down the paper so that the line is covered and write the last word in your poetry line on top so the next player can see it (but not the original line underneath). Pass the paper to the next player who then should write the next line of poetry so that it rhymes with the visible word. Fold down the paper so that this second poetry line is covered, but DO NOT write down the last word, as done previously. Pass the paper to the next player who should write a new poetry line without any inspiration from the previous player, but should write down HIS last word, so that the next generated poetry line will rhyme with his. Alternate between sharing the last word and not sharing for inspiration to generate pairs of rhyming stanzas. This method can be used to generate poems of any length. (To make sure you have pairs, be sure to do an even number of passes; that is, that the last line is an "inspired" line, based on the visible last word written by the previous player.) Once the poetry writing is "complete" each child should unfold the paper he has in his hand and read it to the great enjoyment of all.

Here an example of how a two stanza poem could be generated from four players: Child 1 writes "Once upon there was a cat" (the paper is folded down and Child 1 writes "cat" on the outside, then passes it to Child 2). Child 2 reads "cat" and writes: "Mary wore a funny hat" (the paper is folded down and passed to Child 3, with no writing on the outside). Child 3 comes up with a fresh uninspired line: "High in the sky flies the plane" (the paper is folded down again and Child 3 writes "plane" on the outside and passes it to Child 4). Child 4 reads "plane" and writes: "Chugga-chugga, comes the train." Each child, of course, would be writing on a different paper at each pass, so at the end of the four passes four separate two-stanza poems would have been generated, each unique and hilarious.

Blessings!

Source
Edythe and David Demarch. Handbook of Co-Ed Teen Activities