Daily Wordplay 360! Full Year of Fun Word Game Bellringers

Daily Wordplay 360 is a series of three hundred and sixty language games that could be used as bell-ringers or bonus activities or as SAT or ACT vocabulary prep.

I created these word games as a way to get students’ brains working as they come into class and get ready to work. Each activity engages students in a different way, and each is designed to exercise a different language concept or skill—from synonym recognition and interpreting idioms to SAT/ACT vocabulary prep. The goal is to get them thinking about language, learning new vocabulary words, and getting their creative juices flowing—and a somewhat sneakier goal is to covertly convince kids that English can be fun!

THE DOWNLOAD INCLUDES EIGHT BRAND NEW WORD GAMES:

* ALPHA – OMEGA: Students get a big new word and have to come up with additional words that start with the same letter and end with the same letter. (They also get the word’s definition for some not-so-subtle vocabulary indoctrination, which is great.)
* CONSONANTS OR VOWELS: Students decipher two large words that are near-synonyms. For one, they get only the consonants, and for the other they get only the vowels. But they get the shared definition.
* PYRAMID SCHEME: Students build words one letter at a time to connect two words in a stacked pyramid of words that are each just one letter different from one another.
* PLUS ONE: Starting with a three-letter word, students add or exchange one letter at a time to build toward the biggest word possible.
* THE MATRIX: Students get a grid of letters and create words by connecting adjacent letters.
* TWO FOR ONE: Students get cryptic definitions or synonyms of the two simple words that make a compound word.
* HOMOPHONE HUNTER: Students get clues or definitions to help them figure out a set of commonly confused homophones.
* LITERALLY: Probably my favorite new game just because it’s goofy. Students figure out a common figurative idiom based on a clue that takes the idiom literally.

This full-year package contains enough Daily Wordplay activities to last through every day of class with plenty of extras as well as a teacher's guide with instructions for each game and ideas for how to use them in class.

If you like these activities, check out my Ten-Minute Grammar units, which incorporate the original Wordplay games as a bonus activity after daily grammar bell-ringers. These new upper-level games will be included in the high-school version of Ten-Minute Grammar, which is in the works now.

And if you're looking for more difficult word games for lower aged students, check out:
WORDPLAY JUNIOR: DAILY WORD GAMES! 2nd - 4th Grades
WORDPLAY PRIME: DAILY WORD GAMES! 4th - 6th Grades
DAILY WORDPLAY! FULL YEAR OF LANGUAGE GAMES! 7th - 8th Grades
DAILY WORDPLAY! EXTREME EDITION 8th - 12th Grades

This product download will come as a pack of PDF files (a separate file for each Wordplay game) and is intended to be projected directly from your computer (otherwise the students don't get to enjoy the colorful designs of the daily games.)

I hope you enjoy this as much as my students do!

Created by Arik Durfee