Stomp Words to Build Literacy
This word building stomp game is a simple way to teach spelling, takes only minutes to make, and gets your child thinking and moving, inside or out.
Materials
Directions
Open up the empty cereal boxes and lay them flat, then cut out 9 or 12 rectangular tiles of roughly the same size.
Make a list of 3- to 4-letter words on one of the scraps of cardboard.
Write letters from the words on your list on the rectangular cardboard tiles, one letter per tile. Choose capital or lowercase, depending on your child’s grade level. Arrange the cardboard tiles on the floor in a grid-like pattern.
Now for the fun part! Have your child stand at the foot of the letter grid and then you call out the first word. Your child should shout out the first letter of the word and then jump to it and stomp on it when they land, before looking around for letter #2, shouting it out, jumping and stomping again. This will repeat until your child has spelled the word or is out of breath — whichever comes first! Continue down your word list until your little spelling champion is tuckered out.
Jeff Bogle is an at-home dad who writes humorously about parenting and all things childhood on his site Out With The Kids. He is married to an adorable redheaded gal and has two lovely little ladies 12 and under who provide him with countless hours of humorous in-home entertainment, and who get to hear, see, and play with more cool stuff than you can possibly imagine.
Literacy