Younger Learner Spelling Warmer

Activity type: this is a kinesthetic activity in which students have to spell words out with their bodies.

Level: All levels

Teacher’s notes:

Put the students into groups of threes. Stand in front of them and get into the shape of a letter using your body e.g. you could put your legs together and then put your arms in a ‘v’ shape over your head; you are a ‘Y’. Tell them to guess which letter you are.
Try a few more letters each time asking the students to guess the letter that you are. Eventually spell out a word with your body, i.e. a letter at a time. This will mean that students can practice to spell words and review the alphabet. Make it simple i.e. a two letter word.
Then tell the groups of threes that they are going to spell words with their bodies as you have just done. Give them a few minutes to think of a word and then time to practice getting into the shapes of the letters.
Once they have done this, tell one group to get into the shape of the word. Ask the rest of the class to spell out what they are.
Go around all of the groups.
Change the numbers into the groups i.e. tell the students to get into groups of fours or fives and correspondingly spell out a word with four or five letters.

Alternative: if the students are really good at this, ask them to spell out a sentence with their bodies. This means that they can assemble themselves into one word at a time in the order that the words are in the sentence and then the remaining students in the group can ‘read’ them.