The teaching activities presented in this pamphlet present some ways of helping children acquire a few "mechanisms" to support exploration, growth, and search in language learning and, more specifically, in spelling awareness. The pamphlet begins with a discussion of the context for learning strategies to use in exploring language. Then it tells how to get started by increasing children's exposure to language--as listeners, talkers, readers, and writers--through the use of a rich literature environment and jingles, rhymes, and games. Next, it focuses on exploring language through word play and includes sample activities that allow children to do some of the following things: examine and compare words as whole structures, study changes in structure and the reasons for the changes, use words in differing contexts that perhaps alter meaning, examine meaning relationships in words with changing letter orientation, and discover the functions of vowels and consonants in determining how words can be read or written. The pamphlet concludes by emphasizing the importance of integrating the activities as widely as possible to gain maximum benefit. (EL)