Game On: Fun with Language Learning

Your child receives plenty of traditional instruction during the school day. There are the spelling tests, the vocabulary drills, the reading-comprehension quizzes . . . in short, while many teachers do put significant effort into making learning more interesting and accessible, a typical school day will almost always include a fair amount of cut-and-dried tasks. Knowing this, it's important that your child's tutoring sessions introduce a degree of pedagogical novelty. That's a fancy way of saying that it's perfectly OK to have fun during tutoring sessions — in fact, it's preferable!

Try to incorporate fun and whimsy into at least one of your weekly tutoring sessions. While you certainly should spend ample time reviewing concepts that your child needs for academic success, out-of-the-box activities can work wonders in maintaining your child's interest and engagement. And, you'll find that teaching tools exist in seemingly unlikely places! Here are some simple ways to make language-learning fun.

Break out the Mad Libs. This fill-in-the-blank game was a staple of family car trips for decades. But in addition to being entertaining, Mad Libs can also provide great practice with parts of speech, particularly for the second- to fourth-grade set. Playing Mad Libs requires kids to know what nouns, verbs, adjectives, and even adverbs are (and, as a bonus, there's no reason why they can't use an adverb like "squishily").

Sit down with Scrabble. Just as our bodies need exercise to stay agile and healthy, our brains need frequent workouts, too. Older students can put their brains through the paces by playing Scrabble. This classic game helps not only with vocabulary and word formation, but also with strategic thinking.

Boggle your minds. Sort of like an inverted Scrabble (or a three-D crossword puzzle), Boggle requires players to know plenty of words — and the longer those words are, the more points a player gets. Boggle gives students the opportunity to show off their vocabulary skills, think strategically, and accomplish a task within a given amount of time (handy practice for the timed tests they're sure to encounter in the classroom).

Chances are, you have some (or all) of these classic games in your home at this moment. If not, they're available at very affordable prices through sites like Amazon. (You can find Mad Libs here, Scrabble here, and Boggle here.) Games make tutoring sessions something to look forward to — and there's the invaluable added benefit of boosted language acquisition!

For more information on language learning, please visit http://www.tutorsanywhere.com.