Any topic, any week
Science vocabulary, a book’s characters, provinces and capitals, French words: if you can list it, you can turn it into a word search.More puzzles
See the crossword maker and bingo cards. For pre-readers, picture puzzles have a picture beside every word.Provincial curriculum links
- BC Grade 2–3Word patterns, word families and most conventions of Canadian spelling.
- ON Grade 1–3Explicit teaching of word reading and spelling in the Foundations of Language strand (2023).
A word search isn’t in any curriculum, but it works in any subject. Canadian classes use them for Social Studies units on the provinces and territories, for science vocabulary, or for the week’s spelling pattern, such as words ending in -ight.
Use Canadian spelling in the list (neighbour, colour, centre), since students copy what they find. For primary grades, a list built around one word family gives the spelling practice BC describes in Grades 2 and 3. Older students can make a word search for a classmate from a unit’s key terms, which means checking every spelling first.
Summarized in our own words from BC English Language Arts (Grades 2–3) and The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language (2023).
