Tips for Student Success with Word Searches in Your Word Study Routine

One year, the idea of “blind searching” with a word search came to my mind. By “blind searching” through a word search without having a list of the words contained in the word search, students have a fun way of discovering the word patterns their current word sort will focus on.

“WORD searching” is also an engaging, fun way for students to sharpen their ability to recognize words that ARE spelled correctly (which I’ve found is a major key to spelling improvement). When students find words in the word search, they record the words by sorting them into categories based on the look and/or the sounds in the word (just like when sorting their words with word sort activities!).

So, how do I get started with these at the beginning of the year and what are my tips for student success with blind word searches as an activity?

First, know that these word searches are an opportunity to develop students’ perseverance and growth mindsets.

Most students will not be “good” at locating words in their word searches right away. They may become frustrated, seem unmotivated, and want to give up or complain about the activity. I think this is the case for a few reasons:

1. Students are inexperienced with completing word searches. Word searches are not a typical routine in most classrooms-we may use them to fill time, for morning work on a field trip day, or leave with a sub, but in general, most teachers do not implement word searches regularly into their classrooms. This means that students have not become accustomed to searching for words and have not developed efficient strategies for doing so.

2. In general, we know that children enjoy “instant gratification.” This is not readily available when students first start their word search routine. Since they don’t (in most cases of my word search routines) have a list of words to refer to, they don’t get to check words off. To start, they have to stare at a rectangle of “alphabet soup” and try to locate a word.

3. Because students are working on word searches based on their word study assessment level, many of the words they are searching for are words they do not usually spell correctly and word patterns that they may not recognize. Since the word list itself is a challenge for them, identifying correctly spelled words in the word search can also provide a challenge.

I’d love to help you make this “learning curve” and implementation less of a struggle and more enjoyable for yourself and your students.

Model, Model, Model!

At the beginning of the year, I choose one word list for modeling my word study routines and procedures. Using the same word list for all of my students at first (rather than jumping into students’ differentiated word study levels) makes it easier for me to teach students my expectations for each step in their word study cycle. {It also makes it easier to move to a staggered word study routine later as I don’t want to deal with the chaos of having students doing different activities on different days yet!} You’ll be repeating yourself over and over to address the expectations of each routine if you don’t take the time to model upfront.

Choose a word list that you know is developmentally appropriate for your grade level-perhaps one that addresses a spelling “rule” in the English language-like dropping y to add -ies. If some of your students later go through this list again because that’s where their level falls, it won’t be a big deal!

We go through the entire word study cycle with this shared word list, spending 2-3 days on word hunting with our word searches (making sure that students know the expectations of recording and sorting the words they find EACH TIME THEY FIND A NEW WORD).

Discuss Strategies for Locating Words

—>Use your interactive Whiteboard

I love to pull up the shared word search on my interactive whiteboard (perhaps on Day 2 of encouraging students to locate words on their own-that first day is a great opportunity for you to watch your students’ perseverance levels and ability to handle something that is a bit “abstract” and challenging). I’d recommend NOT swooping in with strategies until you’ve given students a chance to see what they can do without your tips.

You can split your room into teams and take turns asking groups to share a word they see in the word search. You can highlight it or have a student come up and highlight it. Be sure to continue to use this opportunity to MODEL sorting and recording words when they are found.

Be sure students have their own word search copies out, are marking the words other students are noting, and recording and sorting the words as they are found.

When students get stuck, ask them what strategies you all could use to find new words. Some ideas:

1. Look in quadrants where fewer words have been located.

2. Look at the words that have already been found. What patterns do you notice? Are there strings of letters that the words have in common (like -ies)? Can we look for more words with that pattern?

3. If we are looking for words that start with a certain letter or that have a certain pattern, we can be systematic in how we search for new words. This means that we go slowly, line-by-line looking for that string of letters. (So, if we are searching for -ies, we start by finding all of the “i”‘s and then looking all around that letter to see if we’ve found a new word). -This tip may seem common sense to us as experienced word searchers, but I have found that not all students have a systematic way of organizing their searching efforts.

After discussing some strategies, if your students come to a stopping point again, you can give them the first letter of a word you see and encourage them to look up down, left, right, sideways until they identify a word.