How it works
- Pick a word set, such as animals, the farm or Halloween.
- Leave out any words you don’t want by tapping them.
- Tick the puzzles you want, and choose a theme for the page border.
- Download one PDF with every puzzle, then the answer keys at the back.
Why pictures help early readers
A picture tells a child what the word means before they can read it. Matching the picture to the word, finding it letter by letter in a grid and writing it in crossword squares all make children look closely at the letters of a word they already understand. That is how new words start to stick.
Four puzzles from one word set
Picture word search
The word bank shows each word with its picture. Words run across, down or diagonally, never backwards.
Match the pictures
Pictures on one side, words on the other, in a different order. Children draw a line from dot to dot.
Picture crossword
Each numbered clue is a picture. Children say the word, then write one letter in each square.
Colour and trace
A big outline picture to colour, its word to trace, and an empty line to write it alone.
Irish curriculum links
- ReadingVocabulary and early word recognition: the picture gives the meaning, so children can focus on the letters.
- Oral languageNaming each picture aloud is oral language work, one of the three strands of the Primary Language Curriculum with reading and writing.
- WritingSpelling and word study: the crossword and colour-and-trace pages ask children to write whole words letter by letter.
Puzzles are not named in any Irish curriculum, but picture-supported word work suits Junior Infants to 1st Class well. Some word sets follow an American year, with fall instead of autumn, so the animals, farm, sea and space sets fit any time of the Irish school year.
Pictures work for Irish vocabulary too. Hold up a picture from the sheet and ask for the word as Gaeilge before children find the English word in the puzzle.
Summarised in our own words from the Primary Language Curriculum (2019, NCCA).
