(upbeat music) Good morning.

Welcome back with more fun learning here with Arkansas PBS Rise and Shine.

One of my favorite things to do during the summer is to play games.

They're all different kinds of games you can play, board games, video games, sports games, even word games.

Yes, that's right.

You can play games with words.

I know what you're thinking.

How in the world can playing with words be fun, right?

Well, trust me, it can be.

In fact, I brought one of my favorite word games with me today, and I'm going to play it with my new friend, Morgan.

- Hi.

- In this game, one player starts off by building a word with their cards.

It can be any word they want.

I'm going to start first.

Hmm, let me look at my letters.

I think I'm going to build the word snake.

Let's see.

I know snake starts with an S and my next letter will be an N, sn-ake.

I hear a long a sound in that word, so I know it's going to have an A in it.

And then a K. And then to make that a say it's long vowel sound, I have to put that tricky little magic e on the end.

Because when you put the E on the end of a word that has a short vowel, it makes the vowel say its long sound.

So I built the word snake.

Now it's Morgan's turn.

Let's see if she's going to build another word using one of my letters that I used.

- Hmm.

She added an H. I wonder what word she's building.

Let's sound that word out and see what she built.

Huh, a, mm.

Ham.

She built the word ham.

See how this goes?

You take one word, you find a letter, you can build another word off of it.

So it's my turn again.

I think I'm going to use the S in the word snake and I'm going to build the word stop.

Now I've got S-t. Those letters together make a blend, st.

I'm going to use that short O sound, st-ah And then my final sound is stop.

So I took the S off of snake, and I turned it into the word stop.

That's a closed syllable word.

That means my O is going to say its short vowel sound.

All right, it's Morgan's turn.

Let's see what word she's going to build.

She made a closed syllable word too.

She turned the end of stop into the word pig.

Puh, i, guh.

Awesome job.

I think I'm going to take that G and build my next word.

Any guesses what I can use with some of the letters you see up here?

Hmm.

I think I'm going to turn that word into another closed syllable word, and I'm going to spell the word Guh, uh, mm.

Gum.

It's got a short vowel, and it just like pig did.

All right, Morgan, it's your turn.

Let's see if you can build that last word.

Morgan made a little bit difficult of a word.

It's a little bit more complex.

She took the M in gum as her onset.

Then she added, U C H. Now that c h at the end of much, those are special letters.

When the c h gets together, they make a diagraph.

A diagraph is when you have two letters that work together to make one sound.

They don't make their individual sounds.

They make one sound together.

So we have muh, uh, ch.

Much.

Let's look at our words and revisit what we built.

So we started with the word snake.

Snake has a long A sound and a magic E on the end of it.

From snake, Morgan built the word ham, which is a closed syllable word has that short vowel sound.

Then I built the word stop.

Also a closed syllable word.

Then she built the word pig.

And then I built the word gum.

And then she ended the game by putting the hardest word in there of all.

Much with that awesome diagraph at the end.

See, playing games with words can be so much fun.

I want you to take some time this summer and play a few games.

See if you can play a game like this one or even make up your own word game.

Thanks, Morgan, for playing with me today, and I hope you come back for more learning with Arkansas Rise and Shine.

(upbeat music) Ahh, ooo, ooo.

It's time to rise and shine.