Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Rutherford]

Do your students love wordsearches?

I have a cold, we just had an open class yesterday, I have a class of sixth graders at 4pm. I handed out a winter vocab wordsearch and the class is almost silent.

[KingMomo]

You want to STOP A WAR!!!
Give Koreans word searches. I hate doing it.
At least it helps them memorize words for
spelling and topic association.

Done it once
this year. They even stayed 7 minutes after class to find
the last word. Yowzahs!!

[schwa]

I use them once in a blue moon. The kids do go for them.

With younger kids you can list the words in lower case & make the puzzle in upper case for letter association.

Picture prompts are better than word lists.

No word list at all is a good challenge. Find ten whatever (clothes, sports, weather, etc).

Mix them up. Hand out different puzzle grids with the same target words so they dont just share answers. Easy to concoct at www.puzzlemaker.com or similar sites.

[koreatimes]

I combine word searches with games. Use the same vocabulary words with sentences. Feel free to use my notes at http://englishlessons.wikispaces.com

[bueblo]

Kids seem to love wordsearches, especially if their name is one of the items they have to find.

Sometimes, these kids just don't seem to get that it's for fun, NOT homework... I gave my middle school class a crossword today and told them, "it's NOT homework, it's just for fun" but the boys were all freakin out, scrambling to get it finished..

Later, my co-teacher came to me and asked if the crossword was homework... come on guys! What part of "fun" don't you understand?

(This has happened with my elementary class too)

[Rutherford]

I usually make them on mes-english. You can make one with picture prompts and spaces under the pictures to write the word after they find it.

[Carbon]

And we just can't get our heads around why NETs are being reduced. The same song and dance year after year. Every noob finds Bogglesworld and thinks they have found a gold mine of education. "Babysitter" outlines the job description much better than "teacher".

[wjf1]

Be careful with how much you give your students wordsearches. Teachers at my old school used to get complaints from parents because of them.

[bbunce]

Word searches are good but like the last post, be careful with how often you use them. Maybe once every month is ok.

[DIsbell]

I think wordsearches have some use, especially with younger kids. Helps with spelling and textual recognition. The comments about using pictures is good too. I generally use them as a post-writing activity, as students often finish their assignments at different times, so wordsearches are a good individual activity that doesn't have to be started all at once. Also, if you let kids work together on difficult wordsearches and train them a bit on the grammar for doing so (proper questioning, how to use "find" in different tenses) you can get some nice conversation and can also correct pronunciation of target words.

[Draz]

My students always refused to do them and would just screw around if I gave them one. Little buggers.

Edit: I mean when I taught elementary age. I've never tried one with the uni students.

[bobbybigfoot]

Word searches + hangman + magic box = unskilled educator

[dmillika]

I probably relied on word searches a bit too much in the beginning, but have since moved in to creating my own worksheets, or finding some online.

I do admit, though, they are a really easy fall-back plan.

[koreatimes]

What is "magic box"? I googled it and it just brought up this thread as a related site.

[Xylox]