Here's a way to play with words -- their sounds and their meanings. It can help children listen carefully and develop phonetic awareness (the ability to hear sounds in words and discriminate between them).

Materials: None

Directions:

As a class, play a game with nonsense words and phrases to practice rhyming. Begin the game by saying a word (a nonsense word or a real word). Encourage the children to see how many new rhyming words they can make from the original word. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• purple -- durple, skirple, turple.
• cellar -- pellar, kellar, dellar.
• carnival -- barnival, scarnival, tarnival.
• butterfly -- putterfly, tutterfly, mutterfly

After you have played with rhyming words for a while, invite the children to put some of the nonsense words in real phrases so they sound like they have meaning. For example, a child might way, "Yesterday I walked my pet 'durple' around the block." It might be fun to talk about what the new words would mean if they were real.

Note: It'll be up to you to tell the children when "back to real talk" begins -- be sure to give the children a warning with an announcement such as "Real Talk" begins in five minutes.

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