Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Smart Mouth-Game of the Week February 17, 2008





  • My students love playing Smart Mouth. The game itself is a little more challenging than you may initially think. The goal is to be the first to generate a word when given the parameters of an initial and final letter. This is one of the games in my collection that I use as a quick, 5-10 minute filler as the beginning or end of therapy.
  • The Original Rules: Each pair of letters represents the beginning and ending or a word. The player that comes up with the best word receives a certain number of points. A 5 letter word would be worth more points that a 4 letter word. Words that end in ed, er, est or plurals are discouraged.

Modified Way to Play:Skills Targeted: vocabulary building, word retrieval and pragmatic skills

  • Rather than making this a competition, I have the students take turns.
  • If the student is unable to come up with an appropriate word, I will either let the others take a guess or move to the next student. It really depends on the student’s level and abilities.
  • We don’t keep score, when they generate an appropriate word I slide the letter tiles over to them.
  • Most of the kids either line up their tiles or count their matches. I often run out of time or very nonchalantly mention it is time to clean up. The fun actually seems to be the excitement of generating the word.
  • I allow the kids to produce 3 letter words.
  • For most therapy groups, I also let the students use words with common suffixes. I actually may remind them if they are struggling.


Working in the public schools, I often have students who are very language disable. For those students I will just present one letter at time. Most are successful at this level and seem to have fun. If for some reason my more involved students are not having success generating an appropriate word, I may give an extra cue to help them come up with a word.

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