November
Why half of this list is harder than it looks for an English language learner
That matters most in a classroom with English language learners in it, and it is why this page separates the two rather than shuffling them together and hoping.
A word search is usually a safe activity for a learner who is still building vocabulary, because finding a word is letter matching and does not require knowing what it means. Thanksgiving breaks that assumption in a specific way: it is one of the few seasonal lists where a large share of the words cannot be pictured, guessed from context, or explained in one sentence.
PILGRIM, MAYFLOWER, SETTLER and HARVEST are not vocabulary problems, they are background-knowledge problems. A child can find MAYFLOWER in a grid perfectly and leave the lesson with nothing, because the word is a proper noun attached to a story they have not been told. GRATITUDE, BLESSING and THANKFUL are the other kind: abstract nouns that a bilingual dictionary translates badly and a picture cannot carry at all.
The words are grouped below into the ones you can put a photograph next to and the ones you cannot. For a mixed-language class, building the sheet from the first group and teaching the second group separately is more useful than one sheet that quietly does neither. The grouping is a teaching judgement rather than a measurement, and it is offered as one.
Words you can put a picture next to — 28 words
Concrete nouns a learner can match to an object or a photograph without needing the history.
- Acorn
- Apple
- Bread
- Butter
- Casserole
- Cider
- Cinnamon
- Cranberry
- Dinner
- Family
- Gourd
- Gravy
- Maize
- Orchard
- Parade
- Potato
- Pudding
- Pumpkin
- Recipe
- Squash
- Stuffing
- Turkey
- Wishbone
- Chestnut
- Nutmeg
- Pastry
- Platter
- Blanket
The other 30, and why they are separate
These are on the full list rather than the default one. They are not harder to find; they are a different decision about the room you are printing for.
- Autumn
- Blessing
- Bountiful
- Carving
- Celebrate
- Colonist
- Feast
- Friends
- Gather
- Generous
- Gobble
- Grateful
- Gratitude
- Harvest
- Holiday
- Homemade
- Kindness
- Leftovers
- Mayflower
- November
- Pilgrim
- Plentiful
- Relatives
- Roasting
- Settler
- Sharing
- Thankful
- Tradition
- Travel
- Warmth
Both lists are checked when this site is built: every word is four to twelve letters, no word contains another word on the same list, and the subset is a genuine subset. A word inside another word has no honest answer key, so that check fails the build rather than being repaired quietly at print time.
Four ways to use this sheet that are not "hand it out"
Picking the settings for the room you are in
- Easy hides words across and down only and never reverses one, which makes finding them letter matching rather than reading. It is the setting that decides whether a young child can do the sheet at all.
- Grid size is not difficulty. A bigger grid is a longer hunt through more filler: the share of squares that are part of an answer falls from 57 per cent at 10x10 to 37 per cent at 20x20.
- Expert fills the empty squares with letters taken from the word list itself, so hunting for an unusual letter stops working. It is the only setting that resists that shortcut.
- Large print with a smaller grid beats normal print with a bigger one for anyone working with a magnifier, and the two settings are independent.
What this page does not do
There are no pictures. Every puzzle on this site is generated from rules rather than drawn, which is what lets the builder make unlimited sheets with checked answers, and the cost is that a seasonal page here is words on a grid rather than a decorated border.
The list is also fixed rather than editable in place. If you want your own thanksgiving vocabulary, the custom list option takes a pasted list and tells you which words it had to drop and why.
How this page is made and checked
Print Puzzles is part of the Hamilton Digital Media Limited puzzle network, and this page is written and reviewed by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton. The word lists here were compiled and checked by hand, and the grid engine is the same one behind Printable Word Search: it confirms that every listed word appears exactly once in the finished grid, drops any word that contains another word on the list, and counts a palindrome once rather than twice. Read more about how we make puzzle packs, or tell us about a sheet that misbehaves through the contact page.
Nothing here costs anything and there is no account. Grids are built in your own browser, so a pasted word list never leaves your machine. The terms of use let teachers, parents, clubs, libraries and care homes print and copy these sheets and their answer keys freely.