Kids LOVE paper fortune tellers! My students play with them all the time. They are usually distracting the classroom because they keep asking questions like, "who will I marry?" or "who likes me?" or who's my best friend?". I was talking with a teacher friend who told me she built a whole lesson around paper fortune tellers for multiplication facts. She said the kids loved it and made several. Brilliant. Since students love these things, they will play with them on the bus, in the hallway, at lunch and other times. They can make several for the different math facts.

Then I started thinking "how could I use that in English Language Arts?"  They would be perfect for understanding root words, suffixes and prefixes. By asking the students to work in pairs giving each pair a set of word parts and see how many words they can make by using their fortune tellers. For example: un-, dis-, re-, return, relent, -able, -ed and see how many different words they can get from this set of word parts.