About Invert and Reverse
A palindrome is a small piece of delight in a language that mostly refuses to be tidy, and children find them genuinely funny. Beyond the novelty, working out that a word reads the same backwards forces close attention to letter order - which is the same attention that spelling requires, arriving here without feeling like spelling practice.
What this game teaches
- Reading a word letter by letter in reverse
- Noticing symmetry in letter sequences
- Close attention to spelling and order
- A vocabulary of common palindromes
- Playfulness with language as something to explore
How to play
- A word appears on screen.
- Read it forwards, then backwards.
- Confirm whether it reads the same both ways.
- Move through the set of palindrome words.
Before you start
A child should be reading short words confidently. Reversing a word is harder than reading it, so this suits a child who has some fluency rather than one still sounding out.
For teachers
A five-minute activity that reliably produces engagement, and a natural lead-in to asking children to find or invent their own palindromes. Names work well - some children discover their own name or a family member's is one.
For parents
Try it with your child's name and the names of people they know. The moment a child finds a palindrome nobody told them about is the moment the idea sticks.
Related games
- Time Recognition Game — Class 2-5
- Word Unscramble — Class 2-5
- Fill in the Blanks — Class 2-5