You know that buzz of collaboration and learning that you hope for everyday? It happens when we play this game. Every. Single. Time. If you like Boggle, you’ll love this game. Word Wrangle is a fun classroom word game inspired by my love of Boggle and also my love of quiet. Once upon a time, I bought SIX Boggle games for my first year teaching sixth grade. I let my students open the shrink wrap (for effect- because this was going to be so awesome)… and then I heard it. The sound of 25 solid letter cubes banging around in a hard plastic echo chamber, multiplied by six. After that, the Boggle games went away.
Why I Love This Game
This is absolutely my favorite game to play with my class. I make it a point to teach this game early in the year as we are learning procedures and routines. As a result, this is an amazing back up plan, sub activity and party game in my classroom. We start by playing as a whole group until students understand how to play. After that, I group students in so many different ways! I often think about their spelling success as I group them. The game is more fun when kids play against others with similar skills. When this kind of grouping is done- every board is challenging to every student! I never see my strongest students work as hard as they do when they are Wrangling Words against other students who are just as strong in reading and spelling. Likewise, students who often give up on challenging tasks, expecting they won’t have the skills to succeed- LOVE this game. I group them thoughtfully, so that they are playing against others with a similar skillset- and they are always begging for one more round. Lastly, every year I am surprised to find some struggling learners who excel at this game. So, mix up those groupings often, and you will learn so much about your kiddos!
Teacher Hack
I print out my game boards on different colors of card stock. When my class plays in small groups, every group plays with the same game board. at the same time I do this so that after each group has determined a winner, we can share out some of the winning words from each group. As they share, players’ eyes dart around their card searching for each word. I hear lots of “oh man” and “how did I miss that?” Every minute of this game is a learning experience. Usually, I place two game boards at each group so that in a group of 4-6, no one is looking at an upside down card. I do not give students their own game boards because I think managing the materials and sharing is an important part of this game. I set a 3 minute timer for students to hunt for words. When the timer goes off, we switch gears and start the the share out and cross out part of the process.
Color coding my Word Wrangle boards helps me manage multiple groups at once with ease!
What do you think?