My student who didn't know most of his letters said, "We can make the word hat - h, a, t".

Word Detectives - Using the 5 letters found in the word teach, how many words can we spell? We found 13 words - Great Detective Work!  Words and word lists are included for nine lessons

Lesson Introduction- I display the word, discuss the number of letters, number of vowels and number of consonants.  Next, I explain that we are going to be word detectives, discovering how many words we can spell using the five letters in the word - teach.

We began with one letter words, two letter words, and three letter words.  This became more and more difficult as students began to see words of varied number of letters. We found 13 words!  Great Word Detective Work.  We had to create a bulletin board!

Student Work Sample

Word Detective Bulletin Board

Students love being word detectives- nine full lists of words can be found at the end of this post!

Words and word lists for nine lessons

Student Practice Pages