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Crossword Mania

In this activity you'll show your students how to create crossword puzzles; instruct them to do so using information from their texts; then sit back and watch their creative juices flow.

1. What you'll need before you start

• a copy of each of the following for each student in your class

• the step by step guide to building a crossword puzzle
• the blank crossword grid

2. Conducting the activity

• If your students know how to create a crossword puzzle
• If they do not

3. For tools to help you build professional looking puzzles, take a look at these software programs and their associated web sites

• Centron Software
  producer of Crossword Creator, Wordsearch Creator, and several other useful products
• Insight Software
  producer of Crossword Construction Kit and Word Search Construction Kit
  Foreign Language Instructors take note: Crossword Construction Kit provides for spell checking in English (American and British), Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish

4. If you're looking for something a crossword devotee might enjoy reading, why not suggest A Clue for the Puzzle Lady by Parnell Hall (Bantam Doubleday Dell 1999).  It is a mystery novel whose protagonist creates crossword puzzles for a living, while using her skills to solve murders too.  To read an excerpt, click here.  For a list of all the books in this series, click here.
5. The New York Times Learning Network has produced an extensive collection of crossword puzzles on a variety of topics.
6. Here is a crossword puzzle I created with Internet Crossword Creator.  I found the individuals that make it up in Michael Hart's The 100 a ranking of the most influential persons in history (1978, revised 1992).  To learn more about them, and why he considers them, rather than others, the MOST influential, take a look at the book.
   
   To print one of the files, follow these instructions.  After clicking its link, you should see the file you selected in a standalone browser window without a header.  Once you do, click your browser's Print Button on the Toolbar above (for the .PDF files, click the print button on the Acrobat toolbar). After the file has printed, close the standalone window to return to this page.

• these files are in Adobe PDF format
  

• the puzzle
• the answers

• these are GIF files (they print at a lower resolution than the PDF files above)

• the puzzle
• the answers

• click here to play the Java version of the puzzle, live online
  As the puzzle is large, this link opens without frames.  You might also want to change your browser window to full screen if it is not already in that state.  To return to this page when you are finished, press the back arrow on your browser's toolbar.

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original web posting: Monday, September 14, 1998
last modified: Monday, March 23, 2009