We never thought Scrabble would be such a smashing success at our CORP training sessions. We were wrong.
Let’s back up for a second and review exactly what we mean by “CORP training”. As you may know, our Culture of Reading Program (CORP) involves 60 training hours in literacy instruction for primary school teachers, as well as two whole years of in-class coaching and teacher support.
The initial training sessions introduce teachers to basic classroom management skills (a.k.a. crowd control) as well as the fundamentals of CORP’s methodology. Later sessions move on to more advanced topics and demonstrate how engaging and fun activities can make the learning process more interesting.
Engaging and fun activities like, you guessed it, SCRABBLE!!!
In our recent training sessions, fifth- and sixth-grade teachers learned how to play a version of Scrabble that they could use with their students. None of the teachers had ever played the game or seen anything like it before. They couldn’t get enough of it! Most of them stayed half an hour past the end of the training session so they could finish their games. 
If the teachers became this engrossed in a classroom game, we have a feeling the kids are going to get pretty into it too, and that’s more exciting than a triple word score (or TWS, for all my Scrabble aficionados out there). Fun activities and games reinforce the learning process for these kiddos, so we can’t wait for these teachers to introduce Scrabble to their students. That is, if they can pry themselves away from the game first…