WORD GAMES!

Those of us children of baby boomers discovered the information age through educational games: Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and my favorite How the West Was One plus Three Times Seven (yep, that was a math game) stretched our minds and provided us with fun. So it was a pleasure to open Yahooligans! treasure trove of wordgames. It's a simple, colorful site, with link after link to anagrams, crossword puzzles, word-finding puzzles and hangman games. These range from really simple to very challenging, and they certainly strech one's mind. The anagrams (finding words with the letters from other words) I found were the least useful games for the computer, as they really require a pencil to move the letters around, or at least a larger view of the word than was provided.
My personal favorite was the New York Times' mini-crossword puzzle. It wasn't a cinch the way I thought it would be (despite the crossword puzzle tutorial I've been receiving lately from the fellow proprietors of lowdiha.blogspot.com) and if you have javascript, it ingeniously lets you erase squares so you don't have those horrible smudges that crossword-puzzles often end up with.
The two caveats I would offer teachers are to play close attention to the varying levels of these word games, and also ask how conducive some of them are to literacy. I think many of these games certainly do build comfort with words, but many of them also stretch the mind in a more mathematical way and are better used as enrichment than curriculum.