A game with origins dating back nearly 100 years was the focus in Bridget Montario’s fifth grade class at Mandalay Elementary School on April 15. What might have seemed like a break for the students, was actually supporting language and math skills.

Ms. Montario and teacher Mackenzie Maloney organized an afternoon Scrabble activity that sparked learning through competition. They handed out Scrabble boards and students split into groups for games. Youngsters were encouraged to play with a partner. 

Before they played, Ms. Maloney presented a brief slideshow about the history and rules of Scrabble, noting that the game was based on the creator’s love of language. In addition to the traditional board games, students could play a digital version of Scrabble, in which they were matched against a computer. There were also Scrabble challenge cards with different prompts like finding the point values of their first and last names and making words that were worth a certain number of points.

Ms. Montario explained that the Scrabble activity support language skills as it helped students work on their spelling and expand their vocabularies, and math as they had to total up points for the words that they played.