A great game for teaching phonics to ESL students. I printed two sets, cut them out and laminated the game pieces to make them a little more durable.
I play this game when teaching vowel sounds, and after they've learnt ABC's. First, I use the vowel sound that we're working on and put it on the board. For example: _a_. Students draw two cards from a bag or hat and must make a crazy word. Example: student draws T and M. The student can make the word "mat" or "tam". Then they get the points on the cards, which in this case would be 7 points. For this game I remove the vowels from the bag.
The students seem to love making crazy and strange sounding words, and it forces them to practice their phonics skills as opposed to memorizing phonics words, and not the rules.
You can also play with many vowel sounds including mixing up long and short vowels to keep the young ones on their toes.
