From a spelling list to a printed sheet in under a minute. The decisions that matter are the words, the grid size and the directions.
1. Start from the words, not the grid
The grid is the easy part; the words decide whether the puzzle is any good. Twelve words is a comfortable filler, twenty a whole lesson starter, more than thirty becomes an exercise in scanning rather than reading. Keep words short enough to fit: a 12 × 12 grid cannot hold a fourteen-letter word comfortably, and a five-letter word hidden in a 30 × 30 grid is a needle in a haystack.
Mixed lengths make a better puzzle than a list where every word is six letters. Very short words — two or three letters — are the exception: they appear by accident in the filler letters, so a child “finds” a word that was never placed. Skip them.
2. Size the grid to the words
A rough rule: multiply the longest word by 1.5 for the winning dimension. Twelve words of six letters want a 12 × 12 grid; twenty words want 15 × 15 or 18 × 18. The generator will happily try a grid that is too small, and it will report which words did not fit rather than silently dropping them — read that line.
3. Choose directions by age
Forward-only is right for five- and six-year-olds: left to right, top to bottom. Adding backwards roughly doubles the difficulty for a seven-year-old. Diagonal and backwards — eight directions — belongs to nine and up, or to a deliberate challenge. A puzzle that is too hard is not a better puzzle; it is a worksheet that ends in tears.
4. Print with the answer key
Print the puzzle, then the answer page: the same grid with every word underlined, plus the row and column of its first letter. Keeping the key on its own sheet means you can hand out only the front page. Check the paper size before printing — A4 and US Letter are not interchangeable once the grid is sized in millimetres.
5. Save the seed if you need the same puzzle again
Each grid is generated from a seed. The same seed and the same words produce the same puzzle, which is how you can print a second copy for the child who lost theirs, or send the link to a colleague and know they will see your sheet and not a new one.