Sight words are the ones a child cannot sound out and simply has to know — said, come, there. A search puzzle drills recognition without demanding spelling, which is why it comes before a spelling test rather than after one.
Grade 1 · medium
Find and circle every word from the list.
Words to find
doatedidrideoutsoblackamgoodwhite
Generated by the same code that makes your download
Difficulty is a real change to the numbers or the layout, not a label.
Words run left to right only.
Words also run downward.
Diagonals are added.
Tap a grade you can use for a page of everything a child that age can practise here.
Said, come, was, one, they — these do not follow the phonics rules a child has just been taught, and sounding them out produces the wrong word. They also happen to be among the most common words in English, so a beginning reader meets them constantly.
The Dolch lists collect exactly these words, graded from pre-primer to Grade 3, and they are public domain. Roughly half of everything in a beginning reader's book comes from them.
A word search is easy to build badly: scatter the words at random and two of them cross into a third word that is not on the list, which is maddening for a six-year-old. Here every list word is placed first and checked against what is already on the grid, and only then are the leftover cells filled.
Diagonals and backwards placement are held back for the hardest setting, because for a child who is still finding letters one at a time they turn a reading exercise into a visual puzzle.
The Dolch sight word lists (1936, public domain), matched to the grade you pick. You can override them with your own list.
About ten. More than that makes the grid too dense for a beginning reader to scan.
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