Scrabble Scramble

To help sharpen word skills, we've been playing Rummy Roots and a variation of Scrabble as part of our afternoon routine. Rummy Roots is played as "Go Fish", or in this game, "Go Diggin'" as we try to make the most matches of English prefixes and suffixes with their original Greek or Latin roots.

In our own version of a recently learned Scrabble variation, the board is not used and all tiles are face-down in the middle. Each player pulls 7 tiles. On "go" we try to arrange the tiles into words, either in crossword style or not. When a player has used all of his own letters, he says "take one" and all do so. This continues until no tiles are left in the draw pile. As soon as someone uses all of their letters, he says "stop". The point value of unused letters tells each player how many points to remove from used letters. The score value of the remaining used tiles equal each person's score for that hand. It's proved to be an effective way to strengthen word skills!