Christmas Word Search
Thirteen midwinter words are hidden in the grid above, and every one of them reads either left to right or straight down. Nothing is backwards, nothing is diagonal, and nothing climbs: this is the easy setting, and that is precisely what the easy setting means.
Every word reads left to right or top to bottom
Easy here is not a smaller board or fewer words. It is a shorter list of directions, and this one has two of them: across to the right, and straight down. Over three hundred grids built at these settings, all 3,900 words hidden in them went one of those two ways and not one went any other. A child can read this grid the way they read a page, line by line and then column by column, and the words will be in it the right way round.
Thirteen words go onto a board thirteen squares wide. The longest on the list, CANDLELIGHT, is eleven letters and still leaves two columns spare, so nothing has to be crammed in.
Tracing from the end still counts
Spotting the last letter first is how a young solver usually finds a word, and here it costs nothing. A selection is judged on the letters it covers, read either way round, not on the direction the generator happened to use. Drag from the D of GARLAND back to the G and it is accepted exactly as if you had gone the other way. Tapping behaves the same: tap one end, then tap the other. Tapping the same square twice abandons a start you did not mean, and so does Escape.
A word search Christmas list without a single brand name
The list is midwinter vocabulary and nothing else: SNOWMAN, TOBOGGAN, MITTENS, SCARF, ICICLE, FIRESIDE, CHESTNUT, CAROL, LANTERN, FROSTY, SLEDGE, SKATING, MULLED, BLANKET, WOOLLY, HIBERNATE, EVERGREEN, GARLAND, MIDWINTER, SOLSTICE, DRIFT, THAW, SHIVER, CRISP and CANDLELIGHT. Twenty-five in all; thirteen of them are on any one board, and the list printed under the grid is always the thirteen that are genuinely in it, never the full set.
They are words rather than names on purpose. Nothing on that list belongs to anybody, nothing needs explaining to a seven-year-old, and nothing dates the sheet to one particular year.
One grid for a whole class
Every load builds a new board, which is the wrong behaviour when thirty children need the same sheet: printing it thirty times produces thirty different puzzles. Print it once and photocopy that. It does not matter if half the words have already been found on screen, because the printed sheet comes out unmarked, and the word list prints under the grid, so the page needs nothing else beside it.
For older solvers there is a fifteen-wide grid with backwards words, and the main grid sits between the two.