With children who are learning to recognize written words and spellings, it can also be interesting to spend time on words that look very different but sound similar, such as rude and chewed. Just choose a word or phrase from the book to kick off a round of rhyming ping pong. This one’s also very easy to relate back to whatever it is you’re reading, and it works especially well with rhyming books. Then you declare a winner or move on to another rhyming sound. The players go back and forth until one can no longer think of a rhyming word. cat, then the other responds with a word that rhymes, e.g. The beauty of this word game lies in its simplicity, which means even very young kids will love it. Even better: Make up your own (we’d love to hear your suggestions)! Ready to have fun? Rhyming Ping Pong Note: One of the most satisfying things about wordplay is bending and breaking “rules.” So develop these games as you like, or to add more challenge for older kids. Try perusing old favorites with an eye for wordplay or extending story time with a game. A bonus for book-lovers? Often there are ways to bring the games back to your shared reading. There’s no need for props or pens (unless you want them and they add to the fun, of course). Because they’re verbal, you can play them anywhere, anytime-in the car, at mealtimes, during everyday routines. Not sure where to start? We’ve gathered together a few easy verbal wordplay ideas to build into your family’s daily life. So, celebrate and encourage wordplay with your little ones, and they’ll soon be laughing and learning. And, perhaps most crucially, it also opens up the creative possibilities and joys of language. Long before they start understanding written words, wordplay helps children build vocabulary and improve phonological awareness-the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in spoken language, an important skill for literacy. You’ll witness them bend and break linguistic rules, mash sounds together, alliterate, and create entirely new words with an unselfconscious fluidity to leave grown poets and writers in awe. Just listen to any three-year-old skitting their way through a made-up song. And wordplay, like so many forms of play, comes naturally to them. That’s because children make it their mission, as writers do, to play with language.

When Maya Angelou said that a writer has to “take the most used, most familiar objects-nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs-ball them together and make them bounce,” she could have just as easily been talking about children.

Word games to play in the car