Back to school criss-cross puzzle

The first week needs activities that occupy a class you do not know yet. A criss-cross is close to ideal for it: the instructions are one sentence, nobody needs to have read anything over the summer, and it can be done silently at a desk while you work through the register and the forms and everything else the first morning consists of.

It also tells you something. Watching who finishes the fourteen-word grid, who fixes their own spelling when a word will not fit, and who has stopped after three words is a more honest first read on a class than any of the printed information you have been handed about them, and it takes no marking to collect.

The vocabulary is the room and the routine, PENCIL, LIBRARY, TIMETABLE, and that is deliberate. These are words the class will read on signs and worksheets every day for a year, and most of them will never be formally taught. Spelling them into a grid once in September is a cheap way of making sure they are recognised in October.

If your school has its own words, the maker on this page takes a pasted list and interlocks it in a few seconds. The names of the eight classrooms, the subjects on the timetable, or the thirty children in the class, which is the version that gets used most and is the one no ready-made sheet can give you.