Differentiated Wordsearches

Yesterday after school we had a twilight session about literacy, differentiation & sharing best practice across the school.  In addition to this, we’ve had a recent book scrutiny which focused on marking policy & differentiation. 

I have always struggled with differentiation for both higher & lower ability students particularly at Key Stage 3.  I am lucky; our KS3 schemes of work & resources are created for us.  However, there’s a need to adapt resources for my own classes & this is something I have become a lot more concious of this academic year. 

Last night I was trying to think of a suitable plenary for two Year 7 classes.  One class is mostly able with a couple of students who have SEN where as the other class has appoximately half the students with SEN or EAL.  This makes teaching quite tough at times & can make differentiation difficult also.  All I wanted was something fairly simple to end the lesson.  I decided on a wordsearch of the key terms from the lesson followed by a question & answer session as they’re exiting.

I have differentiated wordsearches before but last night I found a great site which made it even quicker & easier to do. Teachers-Direct is very easy to use & quick too which is most important for all of us in our busy lives. 

The first wordsearch I produced is for the lower ability students who struggle with basic literacy.  I chose the basic worsearch option which just creates a list of words which they can search for.  An option is to pick which direction you’d like the words to go in so I’ve picked ‘natural direction’ for this wordsearch & then easy letters to surround the words. 

The middle to higher ability wordsearch is a little bit more complex.  I’ve used an option to add questions or phrases with the searchable words missing.  Therefore, students have to answer the questions before they can search for the key word.  I have chosen for words to go in any directions & left the choice of surrounding letters as medium.

What I liked most was the ability to save PDFs from this site.  I now have two resources for the next time I teach this unit.  I haven’t expored any of the other features on this site as of yet.