Just as jigsaw puzzles help children understand shapes, fine-tune hand/eye coordination and enhance motor skills, so literacy puzzles help them learn new words, comprehend letters and bolster their language concepts. For example, you can give students crossword puzzles that use recent vocabulary to help them practice and remember these words. You can also give students anagrams or word scrambles to help them understand how letters work and what combinations of letters create acceptable English sounds. To teach about language concepts such as homonyms, antonyms and synonyms, give students a puzzle that asks them to match or come up with words based on one of these ideas.
Divide your class into two teams. Draw a line down the middle of a large chalkboard or whiteboard. Write a number of vocabulary words or concepts on each half of the board; try to put them in the same spots on each side. Have each team stand in a line on each side. Give the first student from each team a fly swatter, or just have them use their hands. Read a clue, such as the definition of a word or a synonym, antonym or homonym of a word. The first student to "swat" the correct word wins a point for his team.
Many common board games can assist students with literacy skills. For example, Scrabble can help students master vocabulary and spelling. Assign groups of four students to a board, and instruct them to play Scrabble using vocabulary words that they have recently learned. Be sure to have several dictionaries on hand. Pictionary, Boggle, Scategories, Apples to Apples and Balderdash are also enjoyable literacy games, encouraging students to think about word concepts, obscure vocabulary, phonetics and the applications of language.
You can play Bingo with a variety of language components, such as letters, sounds or vocabulary words. Instruct students to create their own Bingo cards in a three-by-three grid, using a given number of potential answers -- such as a vocabulary list or the letters of the alphabet. Provide Bingo markers, such as candies or small tokens. Read out statements such as "The first letter of the word 'cat'" or "The opposite of small." If students have the answer that matches the statement, they can mark it on their cards. Keep track of the answers for which you have given statements. The first student to fill a row, column or all nine boxes wins.