language/phonics games:

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO BUILD A SENTENCE game You could take a story out of a book and type it on the computer.  Then go back through it and replace 'key' words with colour coded lines.  Print it out double spaced so they have room to write.  You could even bind several of them together along with a key, into a book and give it as a present.  Instruct them to go through the page without reading it, and fill in the nouns, adjectives, prepositional phrases,or even more specific things like 'a name' 'an animal' 'a colour'.  When they are through filling in the blanks then they read their silly story.  You can copy some books that are on their reading level so you know they can read it.

ORAL GAME/DRILL (PHONICS) On cards I had all kinds of word endings ... we began with simple ones like: at, in, ot, ate, un, etc... and progressed to more difficult ones like: art, ant, ish, ent, urt, etc. To play/drill, the child would draw a card and go through the list saying the words (many of which were nonsense words, but the phonics sounding out still applied).  We would give the word ending one point for each CORRECT word that it made.    (Later this even developed into a board game kind of play...as the child drew a card, found how many real words it made, and moved that many spaces... some endings make LOTS of words so a long path was required... or a circular path, getting $200 every time they past GO/start.)  Mostly we would just keep track of which word ending we drilled that day scored the most points.  Sometimes we would get a little silly, but that makes the drilling fun...we would try to think of meanings for some of the nonsense words... or use them in a sentence where it sounded like they might go...  One thing that happened...is sometimes the nonsense word is ALMOST a word...  For example...STess ... the child might say this this is almost "stress" which is a word... I would give them points (kids will try anything for POINTS, even if they points are more or less meaningless) if they could spell the new real word. Another thing that can happen is it SOUNDS like a word but is spelled incorrectly.  Like TRane... but then I would ask the child, if they could think of another way it might be spelled (again giving those WONDERFUL POINTS).  This gave us lots of opportunities to discuss the different ways we can spell the same sounds...

Games for Learning - I recommend you join this yahoogroup.  This is where I got the above games, and there are heaps more.  After joining go to 'files' for all the games with gameboards, plus documents which list games such as these above.  For any further information on a game, go to the messages area and do a search. Under the files section you can download games, gameboards, and games documents.  A great resource!