scissorsFind to reveal
A Chinese pair of scissors is shaped like a crane, giving an everyday cutting tool the silhouette of a long-beaked bird.
School Word Search
Find familiar words. Discover something unexpected.
Puzzle10 words · 11×11 grid · Medium · Answer key included
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🎉 Solved — all 10 words found!
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Find a puzzle word to reveal its fact.
0 of 10 facts revealed
backpackFind to reveal
Japanese children's sturdy randoseru backpacks inherited a Dutch military-bag name, bringing a word from soldiers' equipment into the daily trip to school.
homeworkFind to reveal
The word homework once meant any chore done at home; its school meaning of after-class study dates only to the 1880s.
teacherFind to reveal
In a Sumerian school story, a struggling pupil wins his teacher's praise after the boy's father provides dinner and gifts.
studentFind to reveal
Medieval Bologna students organized their university and set its teaching goals, putting pupils in charge of a system usually run by administrators.
libraryFind to reveal
Some medieval libraries chained books to their shelves, letting readers open valuable volumes but preventing them from carrying them away.
pencilFind to reveal
Pencils never held lead; the gray core is graphite, a soft form of carbon mixed with clay and baked hard.
eraserFind to reveal
Before rubber erasers, people rubbed out pencil marks with rolled-up balls of stale bread.
crayonFind to reveal
An American crayon color named flesh became peach in 1962, acknowledging that one pale shade couldn't represent everybody's skin.
lessonFind to reveal
An astronaut taught science from orbit using knitting needles and floating water droplets, turning household objects into lessons made possible by weightlessness.
True stories · London, England
The accidental eraser
In London, England, in 1770, an engineer named Edward Nairne reached for a piece of bread to rub out a pencil slip, a common erasing method at the time. By mistake he grabbed a lump of natural rubber instead, and was amazed to see how cleanly it lifted the marks. He began selling small cubes of the stuff from his shop, advertising them as erasers. A half-inch cube cost three shillings, making clean pencil work a surprisingly expensive convenience. The everyday eraser at the end of a pencil grew from one absent-minded grab. It is a small reminder that some handy tools arrive entirely by accident.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Trivia
In which country was paper first invented, around 2,000 years ago?
China.
Pencil cores are not made of lead. What soft gray form of carbon are they actually made of?
Graphite.
Which historic library in Fez, Morocco, was restored by architect Aziza Chaouni?
Al-Qarawiyyin.
What do we call a book that lists words and explains their meanings?
A dictionary.
What handheld cutting tool has two blades and handles, with a hinged form familiar in classrooms?
Scissors.
Trivia · 1 / 5
In which country was paper first invented, around 2,000 years ago?
China.
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Play →or printTrue stories · Fez, Morocco
Saving an ancient library
In Fez, Morocco, an ancient library needed modern help. Al-Qarawiyyin belongs to a complex traditionally founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859; the library itself dates to the fourteenth century. In 2012 architect Aziza Chaouni was commissioned to restore it. Cracked ceilings, moisture and poor drainage threatened a collection containing manuscripts more than a thousand years old. Her team repaired the plumbing and introduced systems to control the books' environment, with restoration work completed in 2017. The appeal lies in the meeting of old and new: careful engineering helping handwritten pages survive for another generation, in a place whose history is measured in centuries.
One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
Find teacher, student and pencil among the words hidden in this puzzle. Play free online or print the puzzle with its answer key.
Is this school word search free to print?
This school word search is a free printable puzzle with 10 hidden words in an 11×11 grid. Find words like SCISSORS, BACKPACK, HOMEWORK hidden across, down, and diagonally. You can play it right here in your browser — tap the first and last letter of a word — or download it as a printable PDF with the full answer key on page two. It's free for personal and classroom use, so teachers can print copies for a whole class with no sign-up and no account. Word searches like this one are a proven way to build vocabulary, spelling, and word-shape recognition, which is why they're a favourite with ESL learners, elementary classrooms, and anyone who likes a quiet puzzle with their coffee.
Print this School word search
Sources: Al-Qarawiyyin and its library history · Two women who built and restored the world's oldest library (Global Citizen) · Was bread once used to erase pencil marks? (Snopes) · Inside Crayola's factory: about 12 million crayons a day (6abc) · Edward Nairne and early rubber erasers
Word list, facts & trivia researched and compiled by Sam Letterman — spotted a mistake? Tell us and we’ll fix it.