Written by Joy Porter, AU student and CCE Fellow.
This week we had our biggest group ever. All of the kids who’ve been coming to our program for the last few weeks returned this week and brought some more friends, bringing our total to twelve or so participants. Whether they were there for the free after-school snacks or because of the Scrabble, I’m not sure, but we were thrilled to have them either way!
That all of the kids were friends made the games even more fun as they all sought to out-do each other with the best moves. As you can see, we got some pretty spirited games going. And, since all of the kids who have been coming regularly have a good sense of the rules 
now, they were able to explain to their friends how the games worked. Best of all, we’ve been able to turn the games into little vocabulary sessions, asking the kids if they know the definitions (or the alternate definitions) of certain words, and talking about which words we could make if we added or subtracted a letter. One little girl who’s been coming pretty regularly told me how much she enjoyed learning new words with us and how she’d started looking up new ones in the dictionary to remember for our Scrabble Mondays.
I think next week we’ll incorporate some new word games to keep things interesting— hopefully they’ll enjoy these just as much as they have Scrabble!
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