Vocabulary practice with a twist
A crossword makes children recall a word from its meaning and spell it exactly, letter by letter, to fit the squares.More puzzles
See the word search maker and, for pre-readers, the picture crossword in picture puzzles.Curriculum links in England
- Year 2Spelling includes homophones such as there/their/they’re and see/sea, which make good pairs of clues.
- Years 3–4Pupils spell words from the statutory list and use the first two or three letters of a word to check it in a dictionary.
- Years 5–6A second statutory list of 100 words adds harder spellings such as rhythm, yacht and parliament.
Writing a clue makes children think about meaning, and filling the grid makes them spell every letter, so a crossword suits the Key Stage 2 word lists and topic words from history, geography or science.
The DfE writing framework warns that a simple weekly spelling test can show what children learned for the test rather than what they use in their writing, and recommends low-stakes recall of words taught earlier. A crossword of last half term’s words is one way to do that. In Year 5 and Year 6, ask pupils to write the clues for a partner: it checks that they know what each word means.
Summarised in our own words from English Appendix 1: Spelling of the National Curriculum in England and the DfE writing framework.
