Alphabet Walk
Since we live in the city, we always find ourselves walking, either by choice or necessity. Alphabet Walk is one of the games we like to play while walking. We look for objects whose names begin with every one of the alphabet letters. We’ve done our alphabet walk around our neighborhood, at street fairs, in grocery stores, at a mall, etc. With each walk, we challenge ourselves not to repeat words we’ve found before (but we allow exceptions with the tougher letters, like X and Z) and to find more and more interesting objects.
To play, we bring pens, and papers with the letters of the alphabet written on them. We go for a walk somewhere: a park, a trail, a store… anywhere that allows us to explore safely. We find objects whose names start with different letters of the alphabet, and the first one who spots the object gets to write it down. The first person to find 26 objects wins!
We’ve gotten pretty creative with the tougher letters. For example, we add adjectives to the objects we find (quick car, zebra-like shirt). The X is pretty tough, and we simply find words with X in them (e.g. exit signs).
Alternative Play: Spot to Spell
This one is cooperative play. We think of a word we want to spell, and we start looking for objects along the way whose first letters spell our word. For example, if we were spelling the word HEAD, we’d look for objects that start with H, E, A and D.
Since we are not allowed to repeat words in one walk, we also adjectives and verbs (e.g. hug and we hug!).
