ABSTRACT
This is a simpler version of hangman. Instead of choosing a word for children to guess the letters, make up a secret sentence, e.g. Hello, what did you eat for dinner yesterday? The children guess letters until the message appears. This sharpens all the skills required for spelling. They have to be aware that all words contain vowels; they soon learn which are the most common letters (e.g. e and t); they recognise that certain letters never follow each other (e.g. ck, not kc). Children will start to predict what a word might be, while some letters are still missing, and will be constantly reading as well as thinking about spelling as they try to guess the message. It is also fun to play and invaluable when you have a 5-minute gap at the end of a lesson, or for wet playtimes.
