Printable wordsearch themed on the letters of the alphabet. All the words start with the same letter and can be found vertically, horizontally or diagonally within the wordsearch. Can you find them all?
This activity has been tested on ES grade 6 students. While the wordsearch lists words beyond (or clearly unknown to) ES level students, the main aim is for them to see the formations and spelling "order" of the letters (rather than being able to read them) though they seemed to feel quite smart after finding some of the longer words . Students didn't seem to have any problems, no one struggled or got frustrated and the unruly classes/kids were even quite quiet for 10 minutes!
There are some Japanese words in there (that would be the same in English i.e. aomori) to get them started and give them something easy/familiar to work from which can be edited if you want to add different words or some local "romaji" words. The only issue I had (for Japanese students at least) was that they didn't know that the words would appear in straight lines or were worried that words might occur backwards (which I was careful not to do - so words will run top to bottom or left to right. Diagonal words could read top-bottom or bottom-top but will always read left to right to make them readable). Also you might find that you'll have quite a gap between the students that finish first and the ones that finish last.
If you don't want to spend too much time on this (or have students waiting for others) I sometimes set a 5 minute limit for doing the wordsearch and then 5 minutes going through checking words that some found but others didn't.
I will also include a teachers answer key shortly.