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Notes on method rather than announcements. Written from teaching English at a Buddhist college in Thailand, and offered as practice open to disagreement.
A word puzzle drills one narrow skill — reconstructing a written word from a disordered signal — and which skill it drills depends entirely on how the sheet is designed and how the lesson is run. Three procedures for introducing, revising and scaffolding vocabulary, two design faults that ruin a sheet, and an honest account of where the technique stops being useful.
Read itThai permits about a dozen consonant clusters and English permits hundreds. That single structural fact predicts a family of pronunciation and spelling errors — sa-top for stop, tes for test — and explains why they survive ordinary correction. What the two repair strategies are, why cluster words stall a scramble, and the contrastive work that actually helps.
Read itMost collections of classroom games are organized by the game. That is the wrong axis: what decides whether an activity works is the room — forty-five students, no photocopier, three levels at once, eleven minutes left. Nine activities organized by constraint, each with what it drills and what goes wrong.
Read itMost writing about classroom word games is a list of activities. What is usually missing is the reasoning: what a given activity actually trains, why one procedure works where another fails, and when a technique should be abandoned rather than adjusted.
These notes try to supply that. They come from a working classroom rather than a study, so they are stated as practice, and where a claim rests on published research rather than on my own teaching, the difference is marked in the text.
Suggestions for what would be useful are welcome. The contact address is on the about page, and the tools themselves are the word unscrambler, the scramble maker and the worksheet library.