1 cup sugar
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup butter or margarine (softened)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
In a medium bowl, blend together the sugar, shortening, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Roll the dough into three cylinders (each about 1 inch in diameter), cover, and refrigerate for at least one hour.
When the cookies are cool, help your child use a tube of gel icing to inscribe a letter on each one. The most commonly used letters in the English language are A, E, I, S, and T, so be sure to make a few extras. The least commonly used are Q, X, and Z, so one of each should suffice.
With a stockpile of cookies, you and your child are ready to play all sorts of spelling games. One word of warning: good spellers can win themselves stomachaches if they eat all their rewards at once. A container for each player, suitable for holding extra cookies for the next several days, helps keep kids from overindulging.
SPELLING GAMES
I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE: One player spots an object in the room, spells it with the cookie letters, and covers them with a napkin so no one else can see. The second player then may ask ten Yes or No questions. If he guesses the object, he gets to eat the cookies. If he guesses incorrectly, the speller eats them.HANGMAN: This variation on the classic game has one twist--if the guesser spells the word before the hangman is drawn, she can gobble up the letters.
BUILD A WORD: In this game, players build a word together. The first player puts down any one of her letters; the second player takes the next turn and can put down any letter too, as long as the pair she forms actually could be the beginning of a real word. If the first letter was T, for example, the second player could not put down an X. Players could, however, start with a T followed by an R, then a U, C, and K. The point is not to finish the word; the player who places down the last letter forfeits her cookies.
