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A to Z Teacher Stuff: Making Word Searches
Details
Activity Description
This site was designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily. One of the tools they offer is for creating Word Search puzzles, which is the purpose of this entry. You can also find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials and eBooks, printable worksheets, emergent reader books, themes, and more. The site is geared for K-12 but it has some useful tools.
Preparation
Make your own custom word search worksheets! A variety of options are available including font size, font style, lowercase or uppercase letters, grid shape, word placement, and more.
Experiment with the settings below to find the best results for printing your word search. You may also need to adjust your browser's page setup (change margins, header/footer, or switch to landscape/portrait mode), then go to 'Print Preview' before printing. These options are under your browser's File menu. Landscape mode works best for many puzzles. Also, try setting your margins to 0.5" or less.
How-To
- Use word searches as a way to reinforce the vocabulary that students are learning through reading. As they search the words, they learn to look for consonant clusters and vowel combinations, so especially at lower levels of language learning, this can be helpful.
- It also helps to develop their visual acuity for recognizing English words.
Teacher Tips
- Before you create your word search, you might also want to highlight your word list and press Ctrl+C to keep a copy of it on your computer's clipboard. That way, if you need to come back and change settings, you can paste the words into the blank by pressing Ctrl+V. Otherwise you may have to re-type them. (These shortcut commands work on Windows systems.)
More Ways
There are many things available at this site. Most are geared for K-12 but could be tweaked to work for adult level students.
Program Areas
- ABE: Adult Basic Education
Levels
- Low
- Intermediate
- High
- All Levels
Subjects
- Reading
- Vocabulary