Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Word puzzle

From the beginning I've enjoyed spending time with my son, Nivaan taking care of his school activities and homework. Initially it was just about drawing, shapes, alphabets and numbers and he was highly enthusiastic about it and used to look forward doing them. But now that he has moved up to Sr.KG class, even his activities are to the next level, specifically spellings, words and sentence formation. Since these are comparatively difficult and time consuming, it becomes challenging to keep his interest level up during these activities. So, often I find myself coming up with new and innovative techniques of getting things done that really helps both of us. 😊
Since few months, there is this dictation activity going on in his class where all the kids are asked to write about 10 words dictated by the class teacher. These words are shared to the parents one week in advance so that they can make the kids practice writing those words. Making a kid write 10 words seems a pretty simple task but believe me, my son's interest lasts only till the forth word and after that it's a war between him and me. So I decided to come up with a great idea of getting those words added in a word puzzle and make him solve it. A puzzle and the sense of accomplishing solving it always drives the kids. It worked quite well in my case as my son got interested in it every week and in the process I could make him get the phonetics and spellings of each word correctly. The results in the class were also encouraging and this made him feel good about it. Mission accomplished! 😎
Here is how it went down. Initially, I made the word puzzle myself on a sheet of paper taking the words given by the teacher.

But as this was weekly activity, I decided to improvise and automate it. I wrote a program which would take 3 parameters as input; complexity, number of words and the list of words. And the output of the program is the word puzzle in a file. I just need to take a print out of this and voila! the meal is served on the table.
Before writing my own program, I realized few word puzzle tools were already available over the net, but I didn't find a perfect match for my requirements:

  • I wanted word directions to be only left-to-right and top-to-bottom in the puzzle as I wanted them to be quite easy for my kid during initial weeks. 
  • And I wanted the gap fillers in the puzzle from a selective set of alphabets like O, X, Z etc which will make my kid find the words easily.


Here is the snippet of it -

Input:

Output:

Activities like these will undoubtedly bring a lot of satisfaction not just in kids but also in us as well. Isn't it?! 😉

And now, can anyone puhleeease suggest how to make a kid write 'Fruit' and not 'Froot', and that too after they have taken all the phonetics classes? 😣

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