As a teacher of languages I often find that they can be quite useful.
I use them:
- as a bell activity to remind students of the key words from last lesson.
- for translation purposes (find the French for the following words).
- to engage students who struggle to read.
- for competitions.
- to improve spelling.
- to help students to learn to cooperate with each other.
I was recently made aware of this site, teachers-direct which has a great wordsearch creator tool.
It's ideal for languages as it allows you to include characters with accents.
The word list is always given in alphabetical order but I sometimes don't give the students the words to find.
I'll say for example 9 of the 10 words we learned last lesson can be found in the grid, which one is missing?
The site is full of ready made puzzles but I usually prefer to make my own.
They can be printed or made into interactive whiteboard versions.
Personally, I'm not that keen on the interactive whiteboard wordsearch. It means that many of the students can't see, some won't be watching or working at all and the poor kid trying to do the interactive version is prevented from doing so by his or her own shadow.
You can make wordsearch grids of different sizes from 5 x 5 to 25 x 25 (ideal for differentiation) and you can make a traditional basic puzzle or a puzzle with a cloze passage.
The cloze passages can be copied and pasted from an existing text of up to 100 words. This could then be the basis of some follow up comprehension questions.
Here is one I made earlier:
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