Scrabble Letter Matching

My son has recently become more interested in playing games.  They are such a great way to practice taking turns, which is something we're working on .  We only have a handful of kids' games though so sometimes we just need something different.  A game we've been playing for a few weeks uses our Scrabble set -- who doesn't love those Scrabble tiles and having the tray is so much easier for little hands than holding cards!

The rules we've been playing with are pretty simple.  We each pick 5 pieces to start.  When its your turn, you pick a new tile and lay down any matches.  You can also add to any other matches already down.  I've tried to add some "go fish" type rules so that we can ask each other for missing letters but thus far it seems to work better to just keep it simple.

When we're playing, I usually set his tray so I can keep an eye on it.  Since he's still working on letter recognition, he'll sometimes miss matches if a letter is setting upside down on his tray.  We also play with a lot of "table talk" discussing each letter as its drawn or matches as they are played.  I've noticed his letter recognition has improved -- especially on the letters that occur frequently in the Scrabble set.

Of course while he is looking for matches or having his new letter take a long journey across the table to its group, my mind ponders useful things like the statistics involved in determining how many of each letter should be included in a game set and whether the game manufacturer has ever updated the quantities of certain letters due to modern language shifts.  Hmmmm.

I think next we might work on numbers with the Rummikub set :)