Print out the word mining puzzle and make as many words as you can from the phrase.  This is good spelling practice for young children (and a challenge for adults too -- just ask my husband -- he had to help me with the sample answers sheet *wink*).

Word Mining Tips

• Some people find it useful to rearrange the letters they have available in alphabetical order or grouped by consonants and vowels before they start mining.
  For example, if your word mining phrase is "Happy Birthday" you might find it useful to rearrange the letters:
  • alphabetically:                 a a b d h h i p p r t y y
    OR
  • by consonants/vowels:   a a i y y     b d h h p p r t
     
• Talk to the children about using "rhymes" to help fill in more words.  For example, if you find the word Rat (using "Happy Birthday" as our word mining example) encourage the children to replace the first letter (R) in Rat with some of the other consonants available to come up with Bat, Hat, Pat, THat
   

Word Mining Rules:

• Words that require a capital letter are not allowed (names like David or Sally).
• Words that are pluralized simply by adding an "s" are not allowed (cats, dogs, owls) though their singular is allowed (cat, dog, owl).
• Words that require punctuation are not allowed (ex:  can't, don't).
• To make word mining more challenging, you can also disallow 1, 2 and 3 letter words.  However, if you're doing this with younger children I recommend allowing them to form words with as many letters as they like.

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).

word mining template                                   color or   B&W

with letters rearranged alphabetically   color or   B&W

example answers (not all inclusive, but gives a sampling)     answers