Games make learning fun.

Making your own games is even better. Use these suggestions to create individualized learning games that reinforce your children's best learning styles.

Visual/Spatial Intelligence

Visual learners respond well to images, shapes and colors. Make and play this word shape matching game with your child to reinforce visual learning.

1. Write the vocabulary words onto construction paper.  Make two copies of each word.
2. For one set of the words cut the words out in a simple rectangle or square.  Try to make all the words the same size.  For the other set, cut the words out following the outline of the letters.
3. The game is played by laying all the word cards face down onto a flat surface.  Players take turns turning over first a rectangular-shaped card and then a outline-shaped card.
4. You can choose to allow a player who makes a correct match to play again, or limit each player to one pair per turn.
5. Increase the challenge by writing definitions on the rectangular-shaped card instead of the word.
6. Players can also be required to use the word in a sentence when a pair is made.

Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence

Verbal learners are comfortable with words and should have very little problems with spelling and vocabulary.  Ask your child to create a crossword puzzle for you to solve.

Use one of these online crossword puzzle generators:

Create a Crossword Puzzle!

Free Crossword Puzzle Maker

Crossword puzzle maker

Instructions on how to make a crossword puzzle:

How to make crossword puzzles

Logical/Mathematical Intelligence

Challenge your logical/mathematical learner to make a graph of the current word list.  Look at an example.

Word list:  understand, bicycle, triangle, commute, practical

Words with consonant blends (clusters)	Words ending in the letter 'e'	Nouns
understand	bicycle	bicycle
triangle	triangle	triangle
practical	commute

You can make up any type of categories you want for your graph.  Be creative and have fun learning!

Wordmine is a fun and easy game that builds word pattern skills. Pick any long word and find as many smaller words that use the same letters of the original word as you can. In the word rainbow, I can see the words rain and bow, of course, but I also see the word now. How many more can you find?

On page 3 of Spelling and Vocabulary Games for the Multiple Intelligences learn to play our editor Jean Fisher's favorite subsitute teacher game, Mastermind