Take-Your-Pick Puzzle

Teaching Theme of the Week

from Education World®

Pick and choose from a wide range of ready-to-use online puzzles.

Subjects: Language Arts, Math

Grade Levels: preK-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12

Objectives
Students will:

• use a variety of skills to solve puzzles.

Materials Needed

• Teacher access to the Internet (Student access is not required.)

Procedure
You have many choices for this puzzling activity. Many wonderful puzzle sources are available on the Internet; this "Friday Puzzle" gives you an opportunity to pick and choose from that wide range of puzzles. Following are a few of our favorite ideas for creating the "Friday Puzzle."

Kids' Place Brain Teasers
Logic puzzles are great fun! Because the week is almost over, you might want to do something a little different for the "Friday Puzzle." How about presenting a logic puzzle? (Consider having students work in pairs to solve the Friday Puzzle.) We love this site from Houghton-Mifflin's Education Place. It offers weekly logic puzzles at three different levels:

• Grades 3-4
• Grades 5-6
• Grades 7-8

Click the "Archive" button to pick and choose from past puzzles.

Word Scramble Creator
Students love word search puzzles, and we love this Word Scramble Creator because it's so flexible. Teachers can decide how small or large a puzzle to create. Primary-level teachers can create puzzles that include only horizontal and vertical words. Teachers of older students have the option of including diagonals, or of creating puzzles with words spelled left to right or right to left. Create a word search puzzle from the week's spelling words, new vocabulary words introduced during the week, review words from a current unit… or let students create their own word searches to exchange.

Brain Food's Lateral Thinking Puzzles
Here is a library of more than 50 lateral thinking puzzles. Lateral thinking puzzles are an "acquired taste." Students will get better at solving these puzzles as they do more and more of them. They will really learn to exercise their brains! Lateral thinking puzzles work best when students work in teams or small groups to solve them.

New York Times Learning Network Crossword Puzzle Archive
This archive offers students in grades 6 and up puzzles on a wide variety of themes. Students might work on their own, in pairs, or in small groups to solve these puzzles. Puzzles are grouped by topics, which include American History, Civics, Fine Arts, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and more. The list is quite varied; you'll often find a weekly puzzle that relates to a current unit of study, a holiday, or a timely event.

Assessment
Assessment will vary depending on the puzzles you use. Crosswords and word search are more easily graded. With logic puzzles, you should see gradual growth in students' abilities to think critically as they search for possible solutions.

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