For years, Sunday school teachers have been making their own free Bible puzzles on several easy sites. Granted, Bible puzzles can be bought at very reasonable prices, and programs to design them can be downloaded. The greatest assets of our recommended sites is that Bible puzzles can be created free, without the anxiety of downloading viruses, and they can be tailored to your lesson plans as time fillers and extra activities! Bible puzzles that center around your particular lessons are always great to have on hand.
Armored Penguin is a great place to create easy word searches. Just go to their website with a list of words that go with your lesson. You’ll see a grid of rectangles going across and down. Click in the first rectangle and type your first word. Hit the tab key, which will take you to the second rectangle, and so on. Make sure to use either all caps or all small letters, as the algorithm is case sensitive.
With Armored Penguin, you have the ability to do some fun things, such as name a color and type face. But the word search will size itself, based on how many words you include and how long they are on average. Is that smart, or what?!
Even if you’re plugging in words off the top of your head, the word search only takes a few minutes to complete. Click “Make Puzzle” when finished the page. Alas: You’ll be looking at your completed word search in about a second! You can print in PDF or HTML, or save in either format. If you want the puzzle larger, simply insert it as an “image” into a Word document, then click and drag until it is as large as you want.
Discovery Education is another miraculous yet easy, free site. Some Sunday school teachers find their specialties to be mazes and cryptograms containing Bible messages. However, the site will do any of the following with ease: word search, criss-cross, double puzzles, fallen phrases, math squares, mazes, letter tiles, cryptograms, number blocks, hidden messages, etc. Just come to their site, http://www.discoveryeducation.com/free-puzzlemaker/, with some terminology associated with your particular lesson and carefully follow the prompts (they’re designed for kids to follow, so it shouldn’t be a problem). Once finished, click “create my puzzle!” at the bottom. You will again have your choice of printable or savable formats and can choose colors, fonts, and sometimes other artwork! Just print and bring to class!
Puzzlemaker.com allows you to do easy word searches or crossword puzzles with the same ease as Discovery Ed or Armored Penguin. Its unique feature is that after easily creating your word search, you have the option to “export to Microsoft Excel.” This way, you can open the document in Excel and play around with it quite a bit if you are an Excel-loving artist. The puzzles will appear, one letter in each of the Excel squares. You can then choose from Excel’s two hundred typefaces or insert Microsoft artwork. If you save it as an Excel document, then insert it in a Word program, you can stretch it out to fit on any size piece of paper so that it is centered, balanced, and taking up most of the space on the page.
When creating Bible puzzles, you’re usually in a hurry, and you surely don’t need additional expenses. These three websites for Bible puzzles have been so satisfying the some Sunday school teachers haven’t bought a single program for added materials in years!
