Middle School Word Searches

Boards of fourteen columns and wider, none of them past eighteen, rated medium, and no attempt made to dress them up as easier than they are. Three vocabulary sets lead — Middle School Words, Seventh Grade Science and Eighth Grade Math Vocabulary — and the rule behind them gathers the larger grids from across every topic in the library.

A sixteen-by-sixteen board holds two hundred and fifty-six letters against the hundred in a kindergarten one, and the words inside it use all eight directions: up, down, left, right and both diagonals, running backwards as readily as forwards. Lists of ten to seventeen words are usual. Nothing is padded to look harder — the size is doing the work by itself.

The subjects are the ones an actual middle-school week throws up, mythology and geography and science and dinosaurs, books from the class reading list such as The Diary of Anne Frank and A Christmas Carol, and the music, vehicle and television sets that are nobody's homework. If these stop putting up a fight, the hard tier is the next rung, and its largest boards go to forty columns.

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