Word Puzzles

Puzzles that teach, and puzzles that entertain

The two are not the same, and it is worth being clear which one you want. A word search is a scanning and letter-recognition exercise, it is genuinely useful for sight words and for spelling a term the class has just met, but it does not require the solver to know what any word means. A crossword, a cryptogram or a word ladder cannot be finished without understanding, which makes them slower, harder and much better suited to consolidating vocabulary.

If the goal is a calm ten minutes at the end of a lesson, the themed word searches, animals, space, dinosaurs, the human body, and the seasonal sets for Christmas, Halloween, Easter and St Patrick's Day, do that job well. If the goal is retention, reach for the crossword, the cloze-style missing-letter sheets, or the synonym and antonym matching pages.

Put your own words in

The most useful sheets in this category are the custom ones. The custom word search, custom crossword and custom cryptogram all take your own list, which means a puzzle can carry this week's spellings, the key terms from a science topic, or the names of everyone in the class. A puzzle built from words a learner is about to be tested on is worth several built from a generic list.

For early readers the phonics-led sheets are the ones to start with: CVC words, phonics blends, vowels and consonants, rhyming words and word families. These follow the structure of a phonics programme rather than general vocabulary, so they slot into synthetic-phonics teaching without rewriting your sequence.

Grammar and structure

Alongside the puzzles there is a quieter set of sheets covering the mechanics of English, parts of speech, verb tenses, plurals, contractions, prefixes and suffixes, homophones, punctuation and sentence building. They are less fun than a word search and considerably more useful when a specific error keeps recurring in written work. Every sheet prints with an answer key, so they can be set as independent work.