Spelling Practice with Nautical Flags

Back when we practiced fractions with nautical flags, I discovered something pretty awesome about them: there is a flag for each letter of the alphabet! Cool, huh?

Deciphering secret codes is ALWAYS a favorite activity of my son’s so I knew that using the flags to practice sight and spelling words would be a hit. I was right.

I designed a nautical flag alpha key, three pages of sight word codes, and a 1-page sentence cipher. Download them here.

When my son got home from school, I quickly took his new spelling list and made that into a customized worksheet for him. While I was doing that, my son read aloud a book by Lois Lenski: The Little Sailboat. It didn’t explain the flags or teach him much about sailing, but it was a cute fiction story that related to our activity and snuck in some reading practice (hee hee).

Afterwards, I gave him the key and a few pages to decode. He got right after it, completing the pages in no time. He didn’t even realize he was practicing for the week’s spelling test. Mission accomplished!

The answers to the pages I made are below. Enjoy!

The sentence cipher on page 4 says, "Good job. You are so awesome!"

EXTENSION IDEA: Print four pages of the nautical flag alpha key. Set one aside. Glue the other three pages to chipboard (aka empty cereal boxes), cut out, and attach magnet tape to the back (I did something similar here). That way you can easily make codes out of ANY words ... or better yet, your child can make codes for their friends or siblings to decipher!