Doing Math the Routty Way: Engaging Activities from A to Z (Day 23)

X-word Puzzles– Crossword puzzles are a fun and motivating way to practice important skills and content. There’s something about the puzzle aspect of this task that is appealing to students. Crossword puzzles can be created to assess a variety of skills. They are easy to make and the students love them! 

Check out these student created puzzles!

Resources to Get You Started: 

• The Armored Penguin Crossword Puzzle Maker is an excellent teacher resource for creating crossword puzzles. The program is free and allows you to create a puzzle as a PDF or you can copy and paste the puzzle into another document, such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. 
• The free puzzle maker at Discovery Education is an easy tool for students to use to create their own puzzles. Student-created puzzles can be added to math menus or used as fast finisher challenges (see the picture above). The students love creating them and seeing their classmates try to complete them!

There are many ways to use crossword puzzles. Try taking a worksheet that has numerical answers that can be represented with a single word and converting the task into a crossword puzzle. For example, in the puzzle below, students simplify each numerical expression and write the word form of each number to complete the puzzle.