Battleship Spelling Game

My poor 3rd grader has hit a block wall when it comes to spelling.

We were smooth sailing,

then all the sudden:

BAM!!!!

o,o-consonant-e,oa & ow have gotten the best of him.

I searched Pinterest for any ideas that might help.

I came upon Battleship Spelling.

My boys LOVE Battleship.

So he was all too eager to do it this morning.

 

I did change some things to make it work for us.

For this version of it, I made two blank Battleship boards.

On my board, I placed his spelling words on the graph like you would battleships.

(so they can't intersect like a crossword puzzle)

Also, I was trying to be careful not to have two words touching;

that could be very confusing to a little guy struggling with his words.

Then you play it like Battleship.

He would call out a coordinate, like: C 5

And I would say "Miss" or "You hit the letter a".

If I said miss, he'd draw an x in the box.

If I said hit and then a letter, he'd put the letter in the box.

Once he guessed coordinates and completed a word,

I would say Sunk and spelled.

He then would write the word he just sunk on the "Ships Sunk" list.

Today we worked on our oa words:

We started off with pencil, but he was confusing the miss x's with the letter x.  So he came up with the idea of using a marker for the misses instead.  Smart little guy!!  A bingo marker would also work well.

He sunk all ten of my word ships!

 This game really helped him.

He remembered that English words don't end in oa,

so he knew once he got an o or an a that there was at least one more letter after the a.

The only downside:

(if you could call it that)

He wants to play this everyday!

:)