Word Play with Scrabble

A few months ago we did Game Night Sundays starting with Monopoly Town then we also did a post about Jumbling Tower. My daughter also had fun learning the rules of Chess.

We absolutely love Game Night except it didn't always fall on Sundays anymore and we sometimes had it in the mornings.

I didn't know if my little ones were ready for Scrabble yet but when playing in pairs with a parent or aunt, they had loads of fun picking out the letters after each turn and tallying up the scores with a notebook and pencil.

How to get started with Scrabble

First, get a dictionary for reference of words in case there are confusion on whether words you choose to put on the board exist or if you are unsure about the spelling.

Next, get your tiles in a container that will let you pick out tiles without seeing the letters written on the tiles. A reusable plastic container did well in our case, we just asked the little ones to close their eyes and shake the container when picking out letters. There are 100 tiles all in all with Z and Q having the highest scores at 10. You also get 2 blank space tiles which you can "transform" to any letter of your choosing.

Third, make sure to have a piece of paper to tally the scores on and a pencil for writing.

A standard 15 x 15 squared scrabble board has the Triple Word square in red on all four corners of the board and on the middle top and bottom parts of the board. It's everyone's favorite space on the Scrabble Board. Other high point squares are colored which includes - Double Word, Triple Letter, and Double Letter. These colored squares are for one-time use only.

We let the little ones pick out a letter and the pair who picked the tile with the higher number puts on the first word on the board. Alternately, the one who picks the letter closest to A can also go first.

Getting Serious with Scrabble

My daughter started out with the work "yarn" and she immediately used her blank tile. First one to go automatically gets double word score, at least that's how I remembered to play it so we did that.

We had good laughs struggle to fit the words for the Triple Word Square like "abs", "tiled", and "sew". We were able to fit in short words like "he", me", "si", "an", "or", and "we".

Going into the end of the game, whichever tiles we were still holding, we summed up and deducted from our respective scores. Guess who won?