Words – Tutor Your Child

Free Word Search Maker

A really useful tool, if you have a child who likes word searches, is a free word search maker aka a word search generator.

There are a number of different types on the internet.

Why would this be useful?

Although you don’t want to spend all your time creating and solving word searches, they do have their place.

Familiarising your child with words for spelling
Familiarising your child with specific vocabulary
To expand your child’s vocabulary generally
A useful way for your child to exercise their brain
It’s good for pattern recognition
They are fun to do

List of Free Word Search Makers

Super teacher worksheets

I’ll start with the one which is probably my favourite – it is from Super teacher worksheets.

https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/generator-word-search.html

Just choose the level and then fill in your words. There are 3 levels to choose from, basic, intermediate and advanced and each one shows you the options you can have. However, if you want more freedom to choose you need to look at some of the other word search makers.

Image from https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/generator-word-search.html

The thing I really like about this one is that it gives you a smart set of worksheets and the solution – here’s my example

https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/custom/?ws=hrSpS

atozteacherstuff word search

Here is another very straightforward example

http://tools.atozteacherstuff.com/word-search-maker/wordsearch.php

You just need to fill in the options.

Image from http://tools.atozteacherstuff.com/word-search-maker/wordsearch.php

Note the advice about checking it for inappropriate words. I suspect that it is not just the atozteacherstuff word search that has this problem.

Here I have chosen forward words only but you could have backwards words only or a mixture.

Then this is what it looks like:

Image from http://tools.atozteacherstuff.com/word-search-maker/wordsearch.php

Puzzlemaker at Discovery Education

Another popular puzzle maker is at

http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp

The final puzzle looks like this

Image from: http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp

I used the same list of capitals as in the last example, but you can see it looks much harder. However, don’t forget I only chose forward words in the last example.

Here is the word list:

Image from: http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp

You should be able to click on solution and get a worked example but that doesn’t seem to work for me.

The sheet to input your material looks like this

This is the top of the puzzle maker form — Puzzle Maker

Image from: http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp

Here is a video talking you through the process.

How to make a free Word Search using Discovery Puzzlemaker

Word lists

I find it useful to create my wordlist in Excel first so I can reuse them in different puzzle makers, or choose different numbers when I have a long list.

Talking of Excel here is a video of using Excel to create a Word Search Puzzle. I used to use this method quite a lot myself. It takes longer but I have more freedom to do what I want with it. However, these days I generally prefer to just use Excel to keep my word lists in and then use one of the automatic word search generators.

How to Create a Word Search Puzzle in Excel – Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcoWS8EGywI

Useful Word searches that have already been created

The Word Search . Com

https://thewordsearch.com/

There is a word search maker here but you have to type each word in separately. This may be useful if you want your child to type in a spelling list or a list of specialised vocabulary.

Also, the puzzles only stay on the site for 30 days, so you must print them out if you want to keep them for longer.

However, what I really like about this site is all the word searches that are already there.

Browse through the categories at https://thewordsearch.com/ or search at https://thewordsearch.com/search/