Word Dominoes [Practicing Parts of Speech]

I love words. I love my son. So, of course, I love doing language arts games with him. He thinks we’re playing. I know he’s learning.

That totally fills my cup.

Last summer at summer camp, my son played a wonderful game with dominoes that were imprinted with subtraction problems and answers. I decided it could easily be replicated with parts of speech. I was right.

I made four pages of dominoes imprinted with the names of four types of speech: adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs and those types of words.

Make the Dominoes

I printed them on heavyweight cardstock, cut them out, and glued half of them to two sheets of 6mm craft foam. Using a craft knife and a ruler as a straight edge, I cut them out when they were dry. Then I glued the rest of the cut-outs to the back.

Download a 4-page PDF of word dominoes here.

Now, it was time for the fun!

Time to Play

With the glue dried, I dumped the dominoes in a small plastic tub. When my son came home, we reviewed what makes a:

1. pronoun (e.g. he, her, us, we, they, etc. and replaces nouns)

2. noun (a person, place, animal, or thing)

3. verb (action word)

4. adjective (describing word).

Then, he took one domino out of the tub. I told him to look at the domino. On one end (in a colored box) was a type of word (e.g. noun, adjective, etc.). The other end was a word (e.g. school, jump, she, etc.). His job was to place another domino perpendicular to that one that matched with either end.

For example, if his domino said verb and dog, he needed to find a domino that either had a verb on it (like jump) or the word noun, since the word dog is a noun.

One by one, my son pulled the dominoes out of the tub and arranged them on the table adjacent to others.

He wanted to close up the shape that was evolving on the table, so he often moved and replaced dominoes. This was great practice and a lot of fun, too.

I can’t wait until we play this again!