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Friday, February 24, 2012

Homophones Memory Game


You know what’s REALLY funny to a first grader? Homophones! These are words that sound the same but have different spelling and meaning. Learning about homophones helps your child with reading comprehension and spelling. We kicked off this fun activity with two fabulous books.

There were cascades of laughter during both. My son couldn’t stop giggling at all the silly uses of homophones. These books make language arts hysterical!!


If you haven’t checked out Brian P. Cleary’s Words Are CATegorical series, you must. This is the third time we’ve read one of them and each has been a joy (stop here and here to see the other activities where we used his books). Gene Barretta’s book was equally enjoyable and useful in teaching my son about homophones. I would recommend both.

After reading, I gave my son some homophone cards I’d made. 


Download a 2-page PDF of the cards I made here. Print them on cardstock, glue construction paper to the back so they aren’t see-through, and cut them out. You're ready to play!


Now we made a four-by-six grid of the cards, placing each face down on the table. It was time for a Homophones Memory game! Play alternated between myself and my son.


We each turned over two cards at a time, trying to find a homophones match (e.g. stair and stare). When either of us found a match, we took another turn. The winner of the game is the player with the most matches at the end.


My son’s memory is so much better than mine, but even I enjoyed this game!

10 comments:

  1. What fun! I might do this with MY 1st grader! Thanks for the printable cards!

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  2. Thanks for the tip on the Cleary books, those will be fun to link up with our grammar work. The homophone cards are cute too!

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  3. Thanks so much for sharing the homophone cards! I think my son will get a kick out of them.

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  4. Great idea! This was something I realized we kind of skipped over and I wanted to go back to over the next couple weeks and so this is a very timely post. Thanks!

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  5. How fun! I can imagine a first grader must love this. Thank you for sharing at Sharing Saturday! Have a wonderful week!

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  6. What a great game to teach kids about homophones. We also enjoyed the book Honey Cake Mix-Up - It's a Disney series (volume 5) book about Pooh.

    Congradulations on the award.
    http://highhillhomeschool.blogspot.com/2012/02/blog-awards.html

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  7. What a great idea! I bet my 6yo would adore this - thanks for sharing your printable!

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  8. Thanks for sharing on our Afterschool Blog Hop! We've been having this discussion and this will be a perfect game to teach it.

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  9. What fun! I love playing with words!

    Thank you for linking to Read.Explore.Learn.

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  10. Thank you so much for the printable! We just used it this morning and had great fun. We also made it part of the game to make a sentence using the homophones whenever we got a pair :)

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