Back to School SCRABBLE®

Teaching your class how to play the SCRABBLE^® game can be a challenge. Some of your students may have played the SCRABBLE^® game or SCRABBLE^® Junior with their families. For other students, this will be their first introduction to the game. Whatever your classroom situation, it is best to start slowly. Teaching your students all the game rules on the first day is a bit like explaining baseball to a Martian. Begin by introducing skills students will need to play the game.

Have Fun with Anagrams

An anagram is a word that is spelled with the exact same letters as another word. Example: KITCHEN is an anagram of THICKEN, and vice versa. Learning to find anagrams is an important skill in the SCRABBLE^® game. Here are some ways to introduce your student to anagramming:

• Write the following phrases on the board and ask students what the phrases have in common:
  • one word
  • new door
  • nor do we
• Challenge your students to work with a partner and find all the two-, three- and four-letter words in the word SPOT.
• As students become more skilled at finding anagrams, give them more difficult challenges, such as finding the anagrams for words like CHARM, TEACHER, TEASED and REEF.
• Call on students to find anagrams in their names, the name of the school town or street on which the school is located.
• Invite students to bring in interesting anagrams to share with the rest of the class.
• Distribute letter tiles and racks (only) to pairs of students. Have them pick seven letters from the bag and try to form as many words as they can with those letters. After five minutes, call on pairs to share their findings with the class. Have them read their list of words, give the spelling of each word and tell whether the words is a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

Setting Up...

Set down specific procedures for SCRABBLE^® game play. Generally, in a school setting, the SCRABBLE^® game is played in two-member team pairs - two pairs per game. Designate certain students to distribute tile bags, boards and racks. Have students count the tiles both at the beginning of each SCRABBLE^® game session. An easy way to do this is to have students make a five-letter by five-letter grid on each corner of the board or a 10 by 10 tile grid on the board. Discuss with students how disputes will be handled.

Easy SCRABBLE^® Strategy and Rules

When you first play the SCRABBLE^® game with your students, play as a class. Divide the class into two teams. Have team members take turns drawing tiles from one tile bag and placing the words they make on the game board. You may want to draw a rough SCRABBLE^® grid on the chalkboard and write in each word as it is played, so that all the students can see. Discuss each play, pointing out rules and strategies as the game progresses. Encourage students to find alternate plays that might be worth more points. In particular, have students note the "hot spots" - the double-and triple-letter and word squares that can boost their scores.

When you feel that students have a basic understanding of the game, allow them to play on the game boards. It is best to pair students who have played the game at home with those who are new to the game. Make sure that both teams keep score. As with any game, it may be a bit chaotic the first few times students play, but you will be surprised at how quickly students become proficient at the game.

Take time at the end of the session to discuss some of the more interesting words and plays that they made. You may want to create a bulletin board display where interesting words, plays and high scores can be posted on a regular basis.

By Christine Economos

Christine Economos is the National SCRABBLE^® Association educational consultant. A published children's book author with more than 40 titles to her credit, she began her career in teaching in ESL and bilingual programs in Latin America and in the New York City public schools. Christine has developed curriculum materials in language arts, reading, science, mathematics, and social studies for several educational publishers and for Literacy Volunteers of America, The Literacy Channel, The American Museum of Natural History, The National Audubon Society, and for major public television series including Nature, The American Experience and Great Performances. She continues to work in the classroom as a reading and language arts consultant.

elsewhere on this web site, you can: print activity pages, print score sheets, scorecards and challenge slips or buy a copy of the Official SCRABBLE^® Players Dictionary, Third Edition

HASBRO is the owner of the registered SCRABBLE^® trademark in the United States and Canada. © 2008 HASBRO. All rights reserved. "SCRABBLE^® Brand Crossword Game" is the proper way to refer to this unique group of word games and related properties marketed by HASBRO. "SCRABBLE^®" is not a generic term. To use it as such is not only misleading but also does injustice to the company responsible for the trademark's longtime popularity. All we ask is that when you mean SCRABBLE^® Brand Crossword Game, you say so. 

The SCRABBLE^® trademark is owned by J.W. Spear and Sons, PLC, a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. outside of the United States and Canada. 

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