A “Fishy” Homophone Game

A fun way to teach homophones and homonyms to children is through games. When you use games to teach, you provide students with a memorable experience. The child remembers the game long after class time.

While you can’t rely solely on homophone games to teach them to students, they are one useful method to achieve the big picture goal.

Here’s a simple card game you can use to teach homophones, and it’s based on the popular game Go Fish.

To prepare for this homophone card game, create sets of cards (or use the game cards included in the All About Homophones book). You need a card with a particular homophone written on it, and then you need a corresponding card with the definition of the homophone. If there are two people playing, you’ll probably want to create about a dozen sets of homophones. If there will be more than two players, you might make as many as 20 sets of homophones.

The object of this game, just as with Go Fish, is to collect as many pairs of cards as possible.

To play, first shuffle all the cards. Deal four cards to each student, and place the remaining cards face down in a pile.

On a player’s turn, the player asks another player a question. One player, Michelle, might have a card with the homonym “buy” on it, and she might ask David, “Do you have a card for ‘buy,’ as in I went to the store to buy some gum?”

If David has the card that matches the question, he hands it to Michelle. She then places the pair of cards down in front of her on the table and takes another turn.

If David doesn’t have the card Michelle needs, David replies with, “Go Fish!” Michelle then draws a card from the pile. If the card she draws is the one she needed, she gets to take another turn. Otherwise, it is the next player’s turn.

Play continues until all of the cards match. Whoever has the most matched pairs of cards wins the game.

For more homophone games, purchase the All About Homophones book.