Kitchen word search

Open the drawers and cupboards: this theme is made of the things in a kitchen, from big appliances (refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave) to small tools like the whisk, ladle, spatula and colander. A handful of cooking verbs are mixed in as well: bake, boil, fry, stir, chop and slice.

The microwave oven began with a lucky accident. In the 1940s the engineer Percy Spencer was working on radar equipment when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted, and that observation led to the first microwave ovens. Some tools are much older: people have used ladles, spoons and pots for thousands of years.

Cooking with children is a great way to build vocabulary, and the puzzle can come first: find the words, then hunt for the real objects in your own kitchen. In class, students can sort the list into tools for cutting, mixing, measuring and serving.

Play tip: on hard and expert, words can run backwards, and some short kitchen words turn into other words when reversed. POT reads TOP, PAN reads NAP and WOK reads KOW, so if TOP catches your eye, you may be looking at a backwards POT.