Here’s a fun word game you can play in the car or at the dinner table to help boost your child’s vocabulary. The best thing about it is you can adapt it to different ages and to different language levels if you’re raising bi-lingual kids.
Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash
It’s the opposites game! You just say a word and your child needs to find the opposite word. Simple right? Pick between easy, medium or difficult depending on how old your child is and how well developed their vocabulary is. Try the game with words in both directions and try it in different languages for an additional challenge.
Finding opposite words is a tool used in language learning for learning foreign languages, and it’s perfect for children learning new words too.
In case you run out of ideas when playing (it happens to me), below are some examples, but you can find many online with a quick search (An opposite word is also called an antonym). They start off easy, but get more difficult, introducing both more complex words, but also words of differing magnitude (warm vs hot, which has an appropriately negated magnitude of cool), or adding more complex concepts.
Easy Word Pairs
Hot | Cold |
Left | Right |
Up | Down |
Fast | Slow |
Big | Small |
Easy | Hard/Difficult |
Light | Dark |
Dry | Wet |
Full | Empty |
Noisy | Quiet |
Light | Heavy |
Good | Bad |
Tall | Short |
Young | Old |
Hungry | Full |
Happy | Sad |
Hard | Soft |
Smooth | Rough |
Win | Lose |
Day | Night |
Open | Closed |
On | Off |
Medium Word Pairs
Warm | Cool |
Clean | Dirty |
Possible | Impossible |
Silly | Sensible |
Curly (Hair) | Straight |
Inside | Outside |
Simple | Complicated |
Nice | Nasty |
Beautiful | Ugly |
Bright | Dim/Dull |
Falling | Flying |
Give | Take |
Broken | Working |
Sharp | Blunt |
Rich | Poor |
Floor | Ceiling |
Fun | Boring |
Hard Word Pairs
Transparent | Opaque |
Clockwise | Anti-Clockwise (or Counter Clockwise) |
Advanced | Basic/Simple |
Conducting | Insulating |
Dawn | Dusk |
North | South |
West | East |
Legal | Illegal |
Grow | Shrink |
Ascend | Descend |
Multiple | Single |
Deep | Shallow |
Accelerate | Decelerate |
Amateur | Professional |
Decline | Incline |
Guilty | Innocent |
Include | Exclude |
General | Specific |
Accidentally | Deliberately |