Free Printable Valentine’s Day Create-a-Word

I am so excited to share today’s free printable with you! I’m always easily excited, but today I have a real reason. Jaida, my little reluctant learner, absolutely loved this activity! She wrote all 20 words with no complaints at all. She was so happy to realize that she could spell words on her own that she forgot to whine about having to do school! This is Day 28 of the 31 Days of Free Printables for Hands-On Learning.

To prepare the activity:

Print the create-a-word file (found at the end of this post).

Laminate the “Happy Valentine’s Day!” page if desired. If you are using this with multiple kids or want to use it more than once, I highly recommend laminating to save you from needing to print and cut the letters again.

Cut apart the pink letter page.

To use:

Provide your student with a recording page and a set of the “Happy Valentine’s Day!” letters.

Have them use the letters to rearrange into words that they will write on the recording sheet.

Jaida had a blast with this! I made 3 suggestions through the entire activity. The rest she completed independently with a little bit of spell-check from me.

My suggestions to her included a few word family endings such as -at. She didn’t even really use my suggestions, but instead used them as a springboard to create even more difficult words than I expected.

She did catch on to the fact that she could make multiple words with the same ending sounds such as: line, pine, vine, and nine. (Can you tell we’ve been working on Magic ‘e’?)

She also noticed that she could add one letter and create an entirely different word such as: sand and stand.

There are so many opportunities to make words that kids of all different reading levels can enjoy it. With older or more advanced kids, you could add a timer and make it a race to see how quickly they can find 20 words. Or abandon the recording sheet altogether and see how many words they can find in 5 or 10 minutes.

The great thing about printing out the individual letters is that the kids can move them around to see the words spelled out prior to writing. This was very important for Jaida since she hates to have to erase things. It makes her feel like she’s not good at the activity. But since she can see the words first, she can work out the correct spelling before starting to write. And that makes her feel like a success.

This week she informed me that I’m allowed to tell her that she is smart, three times a day. Which tells me that she is starting to feel more confident in learning which equals awesome in my book!