6th Grade Spelling Games and Activities

What Are Typical 6th Grade Spelling Skills?

In 6th grade, children are usually studying Latin and Greek affixes and root words, vowel and consonant alternations, and word origins. The curriculum may focus on spelling rules, such as dropping the silent e when adding a suffix that starts with a vowel. Students in 6th grade also learn exceptions to these rules and practice frequently misspelled words. If your 6th grader has weekly spelling tests at school, spelling games may help him or her study without getting bored.

What Spelling Activities Are Appropriate for My 6th Grader?

Spot the Spelling Errors

Find a paragraph on a topic that interests your child and rewrite it, deliberately misspelling some of the words or substituting incorrect homophones. Make sure your son already knows how to spell these words properly. Give him a copy of your doctored paragraph so he can correct all the errors.

Play with Scrabble Tiles

This game requires two 6th grade vocabulary lists and some Scrabble tiles. If possible, ask a third person to read off a word from each list. You'll spell out a word from one list while your daughter works from the other one.

If both of your words are spelled correctly, add up the value of each, write down your scores and put back the tiles. If a word is spelled incorrectly, it isn't added to the score. Keep going until you get through both lists. See who has the highest score.

Know the Homophone

Write out several sentences that contain homophones, which are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Read these sentences out loud to your son, challenging him to use the context of the sentence to determine which homophone is needed. Ask him to write down the homophone for each sentence, then check to see if he's correct.

Practice Commonly Misspelled Words

You can find lists online of common words that 6th graders frequently misspell. Rewrite one of these lists, deliberately misspelling the words. Ask your daughter to correct them. Alternatively, you can write several misspelled versions of the word and include them with the correct spelling. Ask her to choose the correctly spelled word.