Guess Who?

You know those teacher moments you come up with on the spot?  Aren't they always the best??  We had some unexpected extra time during word work the other day so I quickly came up with a game.

We are studying the different ways that the vowel sounds can be spelled.  Last week we started with short -a vs. long -a.  I have been using the Words Their Way sorts for this.  My game, for some reason, reminds me of Guess Who?

To play the game, I had the students sort their words.

Then I gave them a clue.  For example, I started with "my word has a long -a sound."  So the students flipped over all their words with the short -a sound.

The next clue was "the long -a sound is spelled -ay in my word."

And so on and so forth, until we are down to one word (I thought I took more pictures, but apparently not!).  I plan to have the students play this in partners eventually, but I wanted to start as a whole class so that they understood the flow of the game.