Arizona ELA Standard: 1.WF.2

Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

How many words can you find within LATKES?

How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?

How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.

Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.

Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.

Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?

One letter. Add another. And another. How tall can you build the pyramid before you run out of words?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect T and PLANET?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Who can guess the codeword first?

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

Plural nouns in English are deliciously fascinating. Yet most plural lessons are so dull! In this experience, students are given a pile of plurals and then inductively create groups and pull out rules and patterns.

When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.

Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.

Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.