Best for puzzles word search

Using games and puzzles in your class is always a hit with the students. Whether you use
them as an introduction for a new chapter, as a practice break in the middle of a section,
or to end a class, puzzles are a useful and fun way to add some interactivity to your class.

One type of puzzle that is easy to apply in about any class is a Word Search Puzzle.

Let’s have a look at some examples. Afterward, you will see how to make your own word search puzzle games and the additional feature that Bookwidgets provides.

• Language Word Search Puzzles
• Science Word Search Puzzles
• History Word Search Puzzle
• Word Search Puzzles for Kids
• Breaking the Ice With Word Search Puzzles

💡 Good to know: all the ready-to-use word search activities are created with BookWidgets. You can easily duplicate an activity for free, edit it if needed, and share it with your students. You can do so in the examples separately, or you can find all the word search examples in the BookWidgets Blog group folder.

Language Word Search Puzzles

Languages are all about words, so it’s pretty obvious that a word search puzzle is a perfect
fit here.

Let’s start with an easy one for teaching foreign vocabulary. We put English words in a
column as clues, and let the student find the Spanish translation :

There are different ways to change the difficulty of a word search puzzle.

• Instead of just having horizontal and vertical words, also place words diagonally
  or even in a reverse direction.
• Leave out the clues
• Make the word search bigger

For example, the following English word search puzzle contains words in all directions,
and doesn’t have any clues (except that you have to look for objects from the kitchen):

A word search also allows you to practice new learning topics. Have you just taught the days and months to your students? Take some time to practice it with a days and months words search puzzle.

Perhaps the holidays are approaching? Or are you going skiing with your school? A fun ‘lesson starter’ could be a word search where your students need to find the different ski equipment that is covered.

Science Word Search Puzzles

Most science subjects come with a lot of terminology to learn. Word search
puzzles are perfect for the job of introducing scientific words in an
interactive way.

Let’s take Biology, for examples: not only do you have a long list of plants,
animals, and other organisms to learn, but each of these consists of lots of
other parts with hard-to-remember names. For every level of terminology, we can
make nice word search puzzles:

How about geography? Names of continents, countries, cities,
rivers, mountains, … All great candidates to put in a word list,
and get your students enthusiastic during class:

In elementary school, you might work around the theme ‘water’ during the world orientation lessons. Wouldn’t it be fun to include small assignments between lessons like the example below?

History Word Search Puzzle

During history classes, you might bring up the subject ‘Greek mythology’. Below there is an example of a fun lesson starter where your students should look for the main characteristics of a Greek hero. FYI: It is a real challenge!

There’s nothing the youngest like doing more than learning by playing.

Word search puzzles can be a great way to teach young kids to read.
An easy way to start off is by letting them search for simple words
(such as the ones from the
Dolch word list),
from a list:

They can match the letters from the description list with the letters
from the center to get to know the letters and words.

You can make things a little bit harder by removing the words from the
list, and replace them by emoji, giving them the chance to learn the
letters by heart:

Word search puzzles can also help with their first steps in math:
learning the numbers and how to write them:

Breaking the Ice With Word Search Puzzles

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we’re fans of
using games as ice breakers in the classroom.
Word search puzzles can also be used as a fun way to get to know each other’s names at the start of
the school year.

You can, for example, use descriptions of the student as clues, and let them find first names in the word
search; or, you can list the first names in a list, and leave the last names to be
searched in the word search:

Are you looking for something more (inter)active? You can use this one! The idea is that students need to look for names of other students in the class. If they find one, they need to get up and start a conversation. So, it is the perfect way of getting to know each other.

Creating your own Word Search Puzzles

I could go on and on about ways to use word search puzzles in the class, but I’m
guessing I don’t have to: by now, you’re probably thinking of some fun
word search puzzles you can use in your class.

So, how to make your own word search puzzles? Well, BookWidgets has you covered with the word search puzzle maker. You can quickly and easily create your own puzzles. All you have to do is enter some words (and optionally, their
descriptions), and BookWidgets takes care of fitting the words together into a nice-looking interactive word search puzzle. You can instantly send to your students’ iPads,
Chromebooks, or PCs.

Don’t have devices in your classroom, or do you like to play it old-school?
Then you can just print BookWidgets’ word search puzzle straight from your browser.

Ready to give it a shot? Just hit the button below, sign up, and start creating
word search puzzles (and many other widget types with a free
BookWidgets trial.

Monitoring live in Word Search Puzzles

With Bookwidgets, you have the opportunity to follow-up the progress of your students live when they are completing the digital word search activity. This, of course, has several advantages. For starters, you can see how far along the students are in their word search. In addition, it is also possible to detect where certain difficulties are. Did you know you could also use it in a playful way? Turn the word search in a contest, and show the results on the board indicating how many words they have already found. The challenge is up to them to solve the word search the fastest. This is how you will see it:

The live widgets function also gives you some handy statistics so you can closely follow up on your students. In this example, student 1 has a harder time finding words. You can notice this from how much time has passed between the last activity and now. In addition, student 1 also found far fewer words compared to student 2.

Wrap up

You now have many different examples of digital word search activities, the explanation of how to create one, and an explanation of the live monitoring feature. So, why are you still reading?😉 It’s time to get started yourself!

Join our Facebook Group to share your own creations with other teachers and let us know on Twitter what you think of the live monitoring.

Add word search puzzles to the list of games you can play with mere words and using nothing but a pen and paper. Oh, I forgot, you can play all sorts of puzzles and games on the web these days. Let’s talk about word search puzzles here.

Unlike crosswords where you pencil in the missing words with the help of clues, word search puzzles are about finding the hidden words in a grid of letters. The word you are searching for may be placed horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even arranged at a 90 degree angle. The challenge of word search is in the clues if provided.

Just like crossword or any word games, word search puzzles are fun educational tools. A teacher can use it as an aid to teach anything from a foreign language to scientific terminologies. If you have a theme for a word search puzzle, search out the best among these ten websites and make (and print) your own word search puzzles.

Wordsearch Fun

You can not only find loads of word search puzzles here, but also follow a four step process to make your own. Your custom word search puzzles can be included under the many categories gives or you can put it under «˜Miscellaneous’ for any that doesn’t fit. You can choose from 5 size choices (from 9×9 to 15×15). You can keep your puzzles private or open them to the public. When the puzzle is ready, you can choose to email it across or print it out. If you feel it’s too easy, the option — Scramble this Game, reorganizes the grid.

Teacherly

At Teacherly, you can create a word search puzzle in seconds. There’s a simple text box to enter the words and a slider that sets the difficulty level. The hardest is — up, down, left, right and diagonal words. You can also browse through other puzzles created by users.

Word Search Maker [No Longer Available]

Word Search Maker makes it even easier to create a puzzle. You can start off with a single word puzzle and copy the code (or send a link across) to your website. You can keep on adding words according to the complexity you want to set. The arrangement of the worlds is pretty much the standard — horizontal, vertical, and diagonal.

Word Turtle (Fun Brain)

To make your own puzzle and print it on paper, you need to start off by selecting the level of game play. For instance, Super Hard is — 18 words, 20 letters, with reverse and diagonal. You can also choose to play against yourself. While playing against yourself, click on the first letter of the word you find; Fun Brain highlights it in yellow.

Word Search Generator

Word Search Generator gives you more customization options to create your own word search puzzle worksheets. You can go for your own word list or choose from the ones already on the site. If it’s a large list, you can choose the number of words you want to pick from the list. What’s great about this puzzle generator is the number of grid options you have to play with including shapes like smile, diamond, and car. Set your font styles and word placement options before you click on create.

SuperKids Word Search Puzzle

You can make your own printable hidden word puzzles using the SuperKids Wordsearch Puzzle Creator. Input your words and set the grid size to create a puzzle page which you can then print out. This one is a really simple tool for some quick puzzles.

Discovery Education’s Puzzlemaker

Puzzlemaker gives you three choices when you generate your puzzle. An HTML one if you want to print it out, a Text option to paste it in some other application, and a Lowercase option which is the same as the last option but with all the letters in lowercase. You can also go with a puzzle which allows letter sharing among the words. The maximum puzzle size is limited 40 words.

WordSearch

Make printable PDF word search puzzles on this site. Of course, you can also opt for the HTML version too. You can customize the layout and the color of the puzzle page. You can see the options you have in the screenshot. WordSearch lets you arrange the words in any direction. Along with the puzzle PDF, you can also generate the answer key as a separate PDF file.

Puzzle-Maker

The Instant Online Word Search Maker comes without any extras. Place your words in the text box, choose the number of rows and columns to define your grid and create your puzzle. You can print the puzzle from the browser.

Just Word Search

This online word search puzzle is based on Flash. While you cannot make your own puzzles, you can play around with the display size and color before printing out the puzzle.

A word search puzzle is only as good as the words you choose for it. Once you decide that, these websites help you to make a word search puzzle and print it out in a few easy steps. Which word search puzzle website would you go for? Let us know.

Image credit: Shutterstock

I have collected a number of wordsearch puzzles that people have
created and publically listed as being some of the best
I have seen here.

To be considered for listing here, the author must of have
listed the puzzle for others to see, it must have a reasonable
title and author, and most of the words of the puzzle must be
shown on the puzzle. The puzzle must have some general utility
(for instance, a list of people in a class isn’t interesting
to that many people, but a list of the elements might be).
Finally, I must like it, and I have my choices for what I like.

I may delete or rearrange puzzles as time goes on. If there
is something you want to keep, save a copy. As I review puzzles,
I may decide that I have too many of a particular type, and
delete ones that are no longer the best examples.

Note that this page doesn’t keep you from making any old puzzle
you like, these are simply ones that I like.

You can help with this section!

• Point out puzzles with misspelled words.
• Point out puzzles that are in the wrong category.
• Point out puzzles that you have created and are willing to list in the
  permanent collection (keeping in mind my guidelines above).
• Suggest new categories.
• I mostly know English. So my ability to put interesting puzzles in
  categories relating to other languages is poor. If you create puzzles
  to support other languages, let me know. Let me know which language!

Please include URLs (web addresses) for any puzzle that you are talking
about. Saying «the math puzzle» will not be useful.

These puzzles are broken down into the following categories.
Look at these categories for the puzzles.
You can also see a
full list across all categories.

The following are the most active puzzles in the last 24 hours.