Activity Overview
When the weather is nice and the kids want to get outside and play and schoolwork still awaits them, try out a game of Spelling or Vocabulary Building Baseball. This activity is played out similarly to regular baseball but instead of using a bat and a ball, you will be using index cards and your brains to earn your way around the bases.
We used this fun game for practicing spelling words and also studying for vocabulary tests and the SATs. The kids really got a kick out of both versions and loved incorporating their studies into a game that could be played outside.
Materials Needed
- A bucket
- Index cards
- bases
- pen
How to Play
- Grab some index cards and write a spelling word on one side. As a variation, you can write out vocabulary with definitions on that back.
- Flip the card over and assess a degree of difficulty for the card and label it with its worth. Easy results in a single, a little harder might be a double, etc. and the most challenging would be considered a home run.
- Set up a bases to represent 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Home.
- Place all the cards in a bucket and mix them up.
- One player is the pitcher for both teams.
- The remaining players split up into two teams.
- The pitcher chooses a word out of the hat and reads it to the first batter.
- If the batter spells the word successfully, he or she runs to the correct base as it correlates to the card value.
- If the batter spells the word incorrectly, the batter is out and the other team gets a turn up at bat.
- Set the amount of innings that you want to play and keep track of runs.
- The team with the most runs wins.
