I have a love-hate relationship with word games. I am a terrible speller, but I love words. Boggle is one of the classic games that I both love and despise. Shake the letter dice, turn the timer, and search for words. Try to find the words no one else does and score points. It’s a fun game and a great one to have in the classroom, but at $12 a set, it can get a little pricy to have enough sets for an entire class. Besides, it’s small, but do I really need one more thing to store? Then it hit me, there’s no reason my students couldn’t play the same game with things we already have in the classroom!
Thanks to our magnetic spelling activity, I have enough cookie sheets and magnetic letter sets for my entire class. I also have a fair number of sand timers left over from the days before every student carried a cell phone. These elements were easy to combine to make my own Magnetic Word Search game (a.k.a. Boggle).
I gave each group of students a set of letters, a cookie sheet, a timer, whiteboards, and dry-erase markers. The students then randomly drew out 16 letters from the storage box and arranged them in a grid on the cookie sheet.
They then flipped the timer (or started a timer on a cell phone) and searched for words, writing them down as they found them. When the time was up, the students compared lists and counted how many unique words each found. For a different challenge, sometimes students drew out 20 letters (a 4×5 grid) or 36 letters (a 6×6 grid).
While my boys still prefer the physicality of Body Boggle, this game makes for a great time-filler. It takes only a minute or two to pass out materials, set up, and start playing, perfect for those days when you have an extra ten or fifteen minutes at the end of class. Happy teaching, everyone.
The Gaming Grammarian 