My first Bananagrams – Word Play Fun

My First BANANAGRAMS

The perfect first word game for pre-school and early readers, My First BANANAGRAMS utilises lowercase letters and word-building, combo-letter tiles to help nurture your child’s love for wordplay and word games. With multiple activities and mini games, they’ll enjoy a play-progression towards our original BANANAGRAMS experience!

Grace is in nursery and has recently learnt to recognise and write her own name and is doing excellent. My first BANANAGRAMS is such a great first word game to help her recognise other letters and try to connect to create other simple words, such as ‘Sat, Dad & Mum’ and is a game that will continue to support and grow with her.

This small compact size is great to take on the go, we recently went out on a day trip by train, and my first BANANAGRAMS was the perfect game to play at the table whilst time ticked by.

Whats inside?

Inside the my first BANANAGRAMS case, contains 80 single letters tiles and 12 combo-letter tiles.

How to play?

Place all of your 80 single-letter tiles facedown on the center of the table. This then forms a ‘Bunch’. All players then take 15 single-letter tiles

The object of the game is to be the first to use all your letters in a connected word grid without a spelling mistake, proper noun, or abbreviation.

To start, any player calls out the word ‘Split!’ Everyone simultaneously turns their tiles faceup and races to arrange them in their own intersecting word grid. You can rearrange your grid at any time, and as often as you like.

At any time during the game you can say, ‘Swap’ and put one of your tiles back, face down in the ‘Bunch’, then you must take a tile to replace the old one. This has no effect on other players, and there’s no limit to the amount of times you can swap out tiles.

To win the game, you need to use all your letters in a connected word grid and shout out ‘Bananas’. Everyone stops and inspects the completed grid. If someone spots a misspelled word they can call out ‘Spotted Banana’ then play continues for all players. Play continues until someone again calls out ‘Bananas’ The first player to complete a grid correctly wins, and is declared ‘Top Banana’

There are so many other ways that you can play with my first BANANAGRAMS:-

You can play mini games to suit the age range:-

Preschooler

Spell your name – Find all the letters to spell out your name in tiles. Try family and friends names too!

abc’s in order – Create the alphabet with the single-letter tiles

matching letters – place single-letter tiles faceup to start. Pick a letter and find its match.

matching colours – Place all the single-letter tiles facedown, now race to find all of the yellow letters by flipping them over as quickly as possible, whoever has the most wins! Try it with all the colours.

The Preschooler is just where Grace is starting to fit in nicely. She has enjoyed playing and making her own combinations from the colours, and really enjoyed finding her own name

Early Reader

Sound it out – pick a letter and think of words starting with that letter and try to spell

Word Families – combine consonants with combo-letter tiles, pair vowels with combo-letter tiles.

Rhyme time – pick a combo-letter tile. Then, try a bunch of consonants to make rhyming words.

Matching game – turn over two tiles at time, keep any matching tiles, the one with the most matching is the winner.

Reader

Vowel power – Use the ‘ai, ea, ee, oo’ tiles. Add the beginning and ending tiles to make four letter words.

Diggity Digraph – A digraph is a single sound which is represented by two letters. ‘Sh, wh, ch, th’ try adding a letter to the beginning or end.

Criss-cross – make a simple word grid. When creating words vertically, spell them out from top to bottom.

Jake enjoyed the Cross-cross by adding family names and crossing them through each other and also testing himself using the vowels and finding letter to create words.

My first BANAGRAMS is such a great game to take travelling to keep kids entertained, with many different ways to play, you could have a few hours before hearing the words ‘are we nearly there’.

Available to purchase from Amazon and all good toy stores.