How To Make Crossword Puzzles (Page 3 of 3) in pdf

How To Make Crossword Puzzles Page 3

HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! What about the clues?

Oh, yeah. The clues.

Okay, well, if you are using the crossword for listening homework or an in-class listening

exercise, you could just give the word as the clue. “Number one across is platypus.”

If you want to give conventional crossword puzzle clues, printed on the sheet with the

puzzle, type them up in one or more text boxes so you can easily place them wherever

you wish on the page. You might want to put all the ‘down’ clues on half the copies, and

all the ‘across’ clues on the other half. That way, you can put students in pairs to do the

puzzles as an information gap exercise—the crossword puzzle becomes a speaking and

listening, as well as vocabulary, exercise.

You might also use just images as the clues. These could be in a clue table, as textual

clues usually are, or placed at the head of the spaces in the crossword (as above).

And, finally, if you want to make the puzzle easier, here are two possibilities. One is to

give the answers alphabetically in a word bank. I like to make my word banks very small

and in faint gray, to encourage students to try to do the puzzle without help from the

word bank.

The other way to make a puzzle easier is to fill in the harder spaces, or even some of the

words.

ACROSS

1. a marsupial that swims

4. a marsupial that eats

eucalyptus leaves

DOWN

2. a beast of burden used in Tibet

3. a cute, rare, large-eyed amphibious denizen of the Amazonian basin

How To Make Crossword Puzzles Page 3