Word Work for Big Kids - Syllables & Rhyming

There are affiliate links in many of the posts on this site. This means your purchase supports myself, my business, and my family when you click through to buy - at no additional cost to you. This site also uses cookies. Please see our full Disclosure & Privacy Policy for all details. Thank you!

Sometimes it’s hard to find word work for older kids. This one involves syllables, and I’ll share another one later in this same post about rhyming. It’s a great way to reinforce concepts taught at previous grades and get a good review in.

First up in our word work for older kids – students created a list of words based on syllables. They had to write a one, then two, then three, four, and finally five syllable word. They worked in teams. You would think this would be incredibly simple for my older elementary students – but it wasn’t! We had our share of mistakes, but that was ok because I sent the students on the lookout for them. So it worked out alright. 🙂

The next word work for older kids was one where the students got to sit at on their desks. {Those are their favorite!}

For this activity each student started with a whiteboard at their seat. They they wrote down one word that they knew had a lot of rhymes. When they had written one word, they passed the board to the next person. That person wrote a word and passed the board. This continued until everyone had written a rhyming word for the original word. No nonsense words allowed!

After that first round, the students started with a different word. The catch here to make it more challenging – the students couldn’t write the same word twice! So by the end we were getting harder and harder words. {The pictures don’t seem to capture that, but as the words got increasingly difficult – I took less pictures.}