What is a Word Scrambler?
A word scrambler is a great tool for reinforcing the lessons your student has already internalised.
These simple, free-to-use resources will take a word of your choice and mix up the letters, forcing your student to analyse the ‘word’, and figure out the correct order of the letters.
They won’t impart lessons in-and-of themselves, so don’t look to them to do your job for you. But they’ll definitely serve as a quick brain teaser for a student to begin or end a lesson in teach from home jobs.
Is a Word Scrambler easy to find?
They’re so easy to find that you’ll wonder why you’re not already using them.
There’s no shortage of possible word scramblers available online, and they won’t cost you a penny.
Simply put ‘word scrambler’ into a search engine of your choice (who’re we kidding? We all use Google. Sorry, Jeeves…) and click around until you find one you like. Or if you don't have time for that, here is a link to a good one.
Word Scrambler
They each encourage you to input a word, and at the click of a button they will jumble up that word into nonsense. It then becomes the task of your student to decipher that word.
Why a Word Scrambler is good teaching online?
They’re fantastic at encouraging your Cambly Kids student to think outside of the box.
If they know the word ‘orange’, then looking at ‘rgaeon’ is going to force them to consider their options.
It might be worth sticking to a theme – foods, drinks, sports, etc. Throwing a mish-mash assortment of vowels and consonants at a non-native speaker might simply prove to frustrate them.
So stick with ‘foods’, for example, and ask them to decipher:
ogana
palpe
anabna
aper
cyherr
Simple, basic words that they’ll have encountered in your previous lessons. They’ll serve as a nice little warm up before launching into your planned exercise for the day.
So here is that recommended Word Scrambler again:
Word Scrambler
This helpful little website will take all of the words you input into its ‘scramble’ section and turn them into a handy little worksheet, which you can then download, print, and hand out as needed.
Speaking of worksheets, here is a collection of ESL Worksheets resources.
Word Scrambler – Final thoughts…
If you’re relying on a word scrambler to provide you with a lesson’s worth of resources then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
But, if you’re looking for a quick and simple exercise to warm your students into the lesson, then word scramblers should definitely be in your list of online teaching tools. This could also be a great warm before engaging your student in free-talk using a random topic generator to decide the topic of conversation for the day.
Check out more online teaching content below – 101 things about teaching online, to be exact:
Or you can click below for a list of online teaching platforms to start putting the word scrambler to use and getting paid for it:
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101 Things I Wish I’d Known About Teaching Online