When parents try to find the best way to help their children improve vocabulary skills, they might find themselves lost in a jungle of resources, and left with a jumble of unconnected hints from books and websites about how to encourage their children to practice and enjoy vocabulary improvement. Vocabulary building exercises and techniques that work for adults don’t always help children, especially younger ones. In particular, it’s important to incorporate images and games into the exercises, both to make them easier to understand and to make them easier to remember. In addition, the element of play and fun is something that will attract children (and adults!) to the games and exercises, and they may not even realize that they’re learning new vocabulary words.

One good way to get children interested in words is to choose games like “find a word” or “unscramble the word.” The traditional game of “hangman” is a good one as well, because it encourages children to think about the letter patterns in words, which will also improve their spelling skills. Even young children can play this game. In many newspapers in the United States, you can find a daily “word jumble” game that’s simple but challenging for older children. The game usually has a set of four or five words that need to be unscrambled, and then certain letters from the unscrambled words need to also be unscrambled to form the answer to a puzzle question. Parents can help children on this last part.

Newspapers also usually have a “find a word” game included, where a grid filled with letters is printed along with a list of words hidden in the letter grid. For children more into online games, the game Word Jungle will keep them interested with its animated characters and scoring system.

As parents, you can boost the power of these games by talking about the words that the children unscramble or find. Help them learn the definitions, ask them to use the words in a sentence, and start them thinking about related words, synonyms, and antonyms. If you do this regularly, your children will unconsciously develop the habit of vocabulary improvement all on their own.