If we juxtapose the OP’s real, underlying concern…
…with blin425’s concern (fostering independent learning), we can miss something really important about learning: It’s inherently a social process. This has been demonstrated time and time again since Vygotsky first articulated it with the term “zone of proximal development”:
Of course the goal is to develop independent learning skills, but those skills don’t magically appear out of thin air. That kind of cognitive development won’t emerge without the parent child bond. I think cases of parents flat out doing their child’s homework are rare. It is not only natural for learning to begin as a social process–it’s requisite. The parent, or older sibling, models and co-constructs not only the steps or stages of problem solving with the child, but also the customs, habits, etc. that go along with it. Almost all fundamental learning comes by way of modeling. The teacher’s job is to put up the scaffold, and then know when and how much of it to take away. In the beginning, this might indeed involve looking something up for the student, simply so that the student can perceive what that process involves when performed by a competent adult or older child.
So it’s almost an abrogation of a teacher’s duties to prohibit a parent’s involvement with their child’s schoolwork, for fear that the parent is simply doing it for the child. If that’s the case, it’s very clear to the teacher, and ideally it can be addressed.
The OP’s concern is that the word search (or whatever assignment) is simply a way to occupy the student’s time, under the guise that it’s actually learning. Really a word search is just an exercise to reinforce only one, limited component (orthography) of something more complex (lexicon)–and which ultimately requires verbal interaction with other humans to truly learn. You cannot truly learn words from a dictionary or a list–or a grid, for that matter.
blin425, welcome to the SDMB. As you’re finding out quickly, we’re a community that places a high emphasis on correct (or at least conventional – you won’t need to wait long to see a descriptivist/prescriptivist argument break out) spelling and grammar.
However, people, this thread is not the place to bicker about it. Please stay on topic about whether or not word-search puzzles might be a useful learning tool, and don’t pile on the newbie like a pack of ill-behaved wolves.
I am a trained high school maths teacher, but I spent two years teaching grade 5 and 6, and a few years teaching ESL. In my opinion, word searches are useful classroom management tools and that’s about it. Sure, word searches can be educational but for any given skill or set of skills that you want students to develop, there is probably a better alternative. I am willing to believe that there is the occasional case where word searches are the best learning tool if someone can provide an example.
But if kids like them (and they often do) they are useful for building confidence, as rewards or just to get the class calm and working quietly in their seats.
I may be biased though. I had a big argument with my year 12 history teacher over whether or not word searches were “busy work”. They are certainly not appropriate for year 12 history, Ms O’Brien. Sorry for calling you a “fucking idiot” but I still I think I was right.
Word search puzzles, imo, would make more sense as a math teaching tool than a spelling teaching tool. A word search, as pointed out by blin, is all about pattern recognition. That’s a very helpful tool in math. In spelling? Not so much. That’s because math rules are constant, while spelling rules change all the time. I mean, yeah, if you’re interested in word origins, it’s helpful to know that the pattern of “eau” almost always means the word is of French origins. But the patterns in spelling change all the time.
IME as the mother of three children (two now adults) who have been through many spelling classes that used word search puzzles as ‘homework’, I can say I don’t think they ever helped. The nights the kids had to write each word three times each? Helpful. Having to use them in a sentence? Helpful; not necessarily to spelling, but to writing skills in general. Having to alphabetize them? Hmmm; not so helpful in learning to spell, but learning to alphabetize is important. Then Thursday night was always “At-home review” where a parent was supposed to give a “spelling test” then the kid was supposed to re-write, three times each, the words they got wrong. That’s helpful. But I’ve never been able to see word searches as helpful in any way to language skills.
I’m the best speller in my family, and I suck at word search puzzles. My husband, OTOH, is a computer engineer, is wonderful at word searches (though he doesn’t see the point in them, so he doesn’t do them), and his spelling is so bad that sometimes he calls me from work to ask me how to spell a word, because he can’t get close enough for SpellCheck to figure out what he’s trying to say!
Sure, both maths and word searches involve pattern recognition but to me it’s a pretty different type of pattern recognition. Finding a given series of letters in a big jumble of letters is different from finding the connection between numbers. Did you have a specific instance of pattern recognition in mind?
The second part of your post I am not surprised by. Being good at word searches is mostly about having a good search algorithm and that’s one of the big things computer engineers are good at finding. I really like discussing word-search strategies with students.
If your kid cannot do word search puzzles, especially ones that most kids his age find fairly easy, then there is some skill that he lacks and needs to learn. It may not be spelling or vocabulary, but that does not mean that it is not important, and just because some exercise is, as it were “sold” by the reacher as a spelling exercise, or whatever, that does not mean that spelling is the only or even the main skill that it is supposed to teach.
Visual searching is an important skill even though it may not be on the traditional list of things you are supposed to learn at school (probably because most kids pick it up in the course of learning other stuff). It appears that Looey’s child is very deficient in it, despite having excellent vocabulary and spelling (and, I suspect, excellent verbal intelligence and perhaps high general intelligence). He clearly needs to work on this skill much more than most children his age do.
If anything, he needs to be doing more word searches, not fewer of them. However, if he finds the ones he has been set to be frustratingly hard, it may be that it would be best for him to begin working on his skills with some easier visual search exercises (which do not have to involve words or letters at all).
I used to be an English teacher (and occasionally still am). The only way I ever used wordsearches was by having the usual grid of words with clues to the words underneath. So it’d be a trivia quiz with hints, basically. It was always a starter activity intended to fill the first five minutes of setting down time - it could be set out on the tables or in a pile by the door ready to get started on immediately.
They weren’t just a time-filler, though - did also prime the students’ minds for what the topic was going to be that day.
One huge advantage was that it was really easy to differentiate by ability.
It would never have occurred to me to use them as spelling aids or to mark them.
Just FTR, this was the website I used for making all sorts of puzzles.
Not at all. I was simply responding to something someone else posted about word search puzzles being good for teaching pattern recognition, but not for teaching spelling. I happen to be naturally good at spelling, therefore I never needed much help. I’ve been pretty good at helping my one child (now an adult) who was not good at spelling to find mnemonics to help her remember.
As for math, I’ve never been any damned good at that. I struggle with it. Oh, sure, I’ve found my short cuts for the kinds of math I have to apply in my everyday life. But math has never been fun for me, whereas language always has.
Fortunately for our kids, between my hubby and I, we seem to have all the bases pretty well covered!
OK, but what useful skill is that? He can spell, has a good vocabulary, is generally bright and apparently functioning at a normal level. When he reaches adulthood, how is not doing word searches in 5th grade going to affect him? I can’t think of the last time I needed to search for words in a jumble of letters in real life.
OP, if my kid was sent home with word searches as homework, I’d be livid. What a waste of time. I did very well in school, but never really enjoyed it because of all the busy work we were required to do. Learn what you need to learn, and call it a day. I can see how this is difficult when dealing with a broad range of learning abilities, but teaching to the lowest level of intelligence in the room is such a frustrating solution. I feel for you.
(Did blin actually say that?) One might argue that pattern recognition is part of reading–and it is, but not at the the level of discreet words. Competent readers take in on average three whole words in an instant, which are processed as one chunk of information.
It’s the same pattern recognition that one might apply to solve a crossword puzzle. With a certain level of literacy comes the recognition of letter combinations that can or cannot occur in English orthography.
Can you identify what that skill is, other than facility to recognize possible English orthographic combinations? As I stated above, it is not a true reading skill, and nowhere else in any area of verbal practice does one ever come across grids of letters as they appear in word searches. Mostly what doing word searches do is give practice in doing word searches.
I should clarify that at least one skill that is (or hopefully is) sharpened with word searches is scanning itself, provided that the student is provided with a list of words to find. Presumably this skill transfers to “regular” scanning of normal printed text. Without a list, however, it is an act of information processing that is unlike any that we are called upon to do with printed materials. We don’t normally scan for information without knowing what to scan for, least of all in unnaturally organized text. Pedagogically, I think it works best to have a theme of vocabulary which should have been acquired by, or at least introduced to, the student before approaching the puzzle.
We also never scan for words in any other configuration but horizontal left-right. So what good do the other directions do? It’s not like the letters are rotated so that you can learn to read upside down or something.
Then again, I’ve always been against tedious homework, to the point where I would let it affect my grade (as long at that grade wouldn’t actually hurt my GPA.) I much prefer the college method of making homework optional as long as you have a good grade from testing.
