Sunday 27 February 2011

20 Most Commonly Misspelt Online Word Search Activity


Thanks to Nik Peachey and Janet Bianchini, I had the chance to put this online embeddable word search to the test. The pedagogical benefits of doing word searches (especially on paper) in classes is highly dubious, and I remember, with horror, how a CLIL teacher I worked with was so fond of doing group activities on them as a means of learning vocabulary. When I suggested other games, he went for bingo in a big way and promptly started using it all the time! Talk about variety!

Anyway, I digress. Being a paperless preacher, I'm naturally pleased to learn of this program. As I mentioned in Janet's blog, I believe word searches have a valid place in our teaching vocabulary resources box, but more as homework, or in the computer lab, as part of a range of other activities rather than using up valuable class time. I also believe, as does David Deubelbeiss, that it's useful to have students prepare a word search themselves. I'd done this last year with a class where a group was assigned the task of preparing a word search on rugby. Doing that on this word search program would have been a piece of cake, and would have freed the students to do other tasks.

Even though I'm very fond of this website, I did find some niggles. I found no way of making corrections, so you'd need to be very careful with your typo. I've requested the creators for some improvements, especially the ability to remove the clues. If and when they comply, I will prepare another word search.

Meanwhile, have a go at this (and your students, too!). Search for these 20 commonly misspelt words (apologies for the inconsistent upper- and lower-case letters). When you've finished, prepare a word search of your own commonly misspelt words. If you copy the embed code and send it to me as a comment, I'll publish it.


To select the word, all you need to do is to click on the first letter of the word, and then click on the last letter. You'll see that the word automatically gets highlighted for a second or two. Or, you can do it the other way by clicking on the last letter first.

Make Your Own Word Search now!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.