Deriving fun out of word play

Newspaper In Education (NIE) session in progress at Samad Higher Secondary School, in Tiruchi on Monday. Photo: R. Ashok

Unpredictability and volatility are two adjectives you may use to describe the English language.

But these very traits that send a shiver down the spine of the glibbest of talkers turns regular learners into ace wordsmiths.

Students of Standard Six at Samadh Higher Secondary School realised that language is not as complex as it is made out to be in the ‘Spellathon' module under the ‘Language is fun' theme.

Words can be absolute fun, if only you knew how to play right. Resource Person M.Prescilla commenced the class with a warm up activity. Selecting a story in

The Hindu , she asked students to highlight unfamiliar words and refer to a dictionary later.

In the first activity, students were asked to generate a list of words by juggling an alphabet of the given word. For instance, they came up with ‘came' and ‘gape' by replacing the first and third letters of ‘game'.

The second activity had students poring over pairs of words.

By replacing any of the alphabets in both the words they had to arrive at a new pair of words denoting the same meaning.

For example, replacing a single alphabet in Ditch and Creek results in Dutch and Greek, both languages.

In the third activity, students had to provide the missing vowels in a phrase and then match it with another phrase to form a complete sentence.