wordle

 I was doing wordle with some little kids, age 9 and 6, kids of my cousin, at my aunt's house in Utah. The 9-year old girl had excellent strategic thinking, with a good choice of an opening word [usually "write"] and a good idea of proceeding to subsequent guesses. Good, but not perfect, spelling. The 6-year old boy suggested some six-letter words, and wanted to use guesses that used letters already ruled out, with a somewhat less cautious or "strategic" mentality. His attitude was that you can use words that are not a possible solution just to gather more information about other possible letters. This is true enough, but I explained that guessing a word with two or more overt "mistakes" was not efficient. 

The next morning, the little girl was telling us about words that spell the same backwards, like "racecar." I told he the term for that was palindrome, and mentioned some complete phrase palindromes like A man a plan a canal Panama, Able was I ere I saw Elba, and Madam I'm Adam.  

The boy was was literate (for someone of that age), with strong phonetic skills. He never suggested words of four or seven or more letters, and to be fair someone who is not a crossword junkie would not automatically know how many letters are in a word automatically, as I often do.