Spring word search: flowers, rain and small creatures

Rules

• Every spring word in the list has been placed in the grid in a straight line; find them all.
• The easy puzzle has words running to the right and words running down.
• The hard puzzle has words running in all eight directions.
• Words can meet at a shared letter. Every word appears a single time.
• Tap the two end letters of a word on screen, or draw a ring round it on paper.

A nature walk in a letter grid

The spring list reads like a notebook from a walk. On the ground there are seeds in the soil, a sprout, a seedling, a crocus, a tulip, a daffodil and new green grass. On the branches there are lilac and cherry blossom in bloom, a robin and a hatchling. In the air and the pond there are a butterfly, a bumblebee, a ladybug, pollen on the breeze, a frog and a tadpole. The weather is a shower followed by sunshine and a rainbow, which calls for an umbrella, a raincoat and galoshes for the puddle. Add a kite, a picnic in the meadow, planting in the garden, the thaw, and the months of march and april.

This is the page to pair with a science topic. After the puzzle, ask children to put the words in the order things happen, from thaw to seeds to sprout to bloom, or to sort them into plants, animals and weather. Because the grid changes each day but the list does not, a class can do a spring word search every morning for a week and meet the full vocabulary by Friday.

On a wet day at home, print the hard grid and a different number for each child. The compound words are the ones to look for first: raincoat and rainbow share their opening, as do seedling and seeds, so read each line to its end before you decide which of the pair it is.

Tips

• Butterfly, bumblebee and hatchling are the longest words; they have few places to go.
• Look for the double letters in puddle, umbrella, pollen, blossom, daffodil and bumblebee.
• When you see RAIN, follow it: the next letter tells you whether it is raincoat or rainbow.
• Galoshes is an old word for rubber boots worn over shoes. It is in the list because puddles need them.
• Each numbered grid can be printed with its solution on a separate page.

How these puzzles are made and checked

A separate scan reads the finished grid from every cell in all eight directions. Every listed word must be found exactly once, at the stored position, and the grid must not spell a word from our deny list outside the listed words.

The puzzle of the day is chosen by the date on your device: puzzle 1 was the puzzle for 1 January 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. Easy: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Hard: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Every number stays open in the archive control above the grid. More detail is on the page how the puzzles are made and checked.