Kindergarten Word Searches

The gentlest puzzles on the site, collected for the teachers and parents of a solver at the very beginning of reading. The grids are ten letters across and ten down, and the lists are short enough for a beginning reader to hold in mind — a whole puzzle on one page, finished in one sitting, with no second column of letters to keep track of.

The words run the way a book runs: left to right along a row, or straight down a column. Nothing is spelled backwards and nothing cuts corner to corner, so a word that has been found reads the same way a child has just been taught to read it. At five that is the whole difficulty, and there is no reason to add another.

Kindergarten Words and CVC Words open the page. Behind them sit the subjects a five-year-old already has words for — animals, food, colours, weather, the classroom — and eight words is the usual list length. On screen a found word locks into place and crosses itself off the list, so nobody has to mark it; on paper each puzzle has an answer key page of its own.

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