Play On Words, PAL Award

Created by parents and supported by educators, Word Witt is a fun and competitive way to build some of the most important academic skills in school aged kids, and will keep word loving adults engaged and thinking.

Word Witt contains consonant cards, 3 vowel dice, one-minute timer, and scoring and writing pads. One player rolls the vowel dice and then draws one consonant card to play. Players then create as many words as possible using the letters shown. The more letters in your word, the more points generated.

Word play during Word Witt was the perfect way to develop phonemic awareness skills in our new readers. Players practiced phoneme manipulation, where sounds are changed within words. For example, one seven year old said, “I see pole! I can change it to mole, role… that’s 2 more words!” With a little teaching, students were encouraged to try phoneme manipulation of final sounds to create “rote” and “rope.”

Modifications for this game were easy to implement to allow for more time as younger players practiced changing sounds, segmenting sounds (or sounding sounds out to create words) and rhyming words to make their word lists as long as possible to gain the most points. Our first grader was thrilled when he realized he could spell “venom” on one round, gaining the most points he had achieved in any round! 

Word Witt was fun, competitive and a great learning and practice game for school aged kids to improve concentration, vocabulary, phonemic awareness and spelling.  

Erika O. Cardamone, MS, CCC-SLP. Speech-Language Pathologist, Toy Expert. CEO PAL Award