No Rules SCRABBLE

How do you play "Big People" SCRABBLE with a six year old who is just learning to read and write? You change the rules. Actually, there are no rules.

With my kids, I like to seize the moment when they are most curious. This moment just happened to rear it's head while I was in the middle of folding laundry, stoking the fire, and emptying the dishwasher. "Mom, can we play SCRABBLE?" Of course, I dropped everything for a good game of No Rules SCRABBLE.


Here is how we played...
1. We turned all the letters face up.
2. I let him spell ANY word he wanted, including names, people and places.
3. We helped each other. I asked him to help me build my words, and I helped him build his. We had a dictionary and the ipad out to help us spell anything we were unsure of, and believe me, there was controversy. One of his words was "Angry Beavers" which is the name of a weird cartoon he likes. He wanted to spell Angry with an "e" which is totally understandable. We looked it up on Netflix just to be sure. Yes, spelled with a "y."
4. When we finished spelling words, we counted numbers on tiles just to see which word had the most points. We'd move over tiles to see if there were any hidden bonuses underneath.


Here, we counted up our numbers for "toothless" (the dragon from a recently popular kids movie) and found a Double Word Score under the letter "e." I told him "that means two of eight." I gave him a minute and he made his calculation by counting eight fingers up, then counted them until they all went down. "Sixteen! I counted my eight fingers two times." No rules, just fun!!!