School Word Search

Did you know?

teacher

Finland trains teachers so carefully that the job is harder to get into than medicine or law there.

student

The word student comes from a Latin word meaning eagerness, so a student is literally one who is keen.

pencil

Pencils never held lead; the gray core is graphite, a soft form of carbon mixed with clay and baked hard.

eraser

Before rubber erasers, people rubbed out pencil marks with rolled-up balls of stale bread.

crayon

Crayola's factory in Easton, Pennsylvania makes about 12 million crayons a day, roughly 3 billion every year.

lesson

The word lesson comes from the Latin for reading, because early lessons meant a passage read aloud to students.

library

The world's oldest working library, in Fez, Morocco, was founded in the year 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri.

scissors

Scissors are over 3,000 years old; the spring-handled and cross-bladed kinds were both used in the ancient world.

backpack

Modern padded-strap backpacks only became common school gear in the 1970s, after lightweight nylon made them cheap.

homework

The word homework once meant any chore done at home; its school meaning of after-class study dates only to the 1880s.

notebook

The word notebook once described a book of blank pages kept for jotting notes, long before laptops borrowed the name.

classroom

Before dedicated classrooms, many children learned in a single room where one teacher taught every age and grade at once.

blackboard

The blackboard spread through schools in the early 1800s, letting one teacher show the whole class the same lesson at once.

cafeteria

The word cafeteria comes from Spanish and originally meant a coffee shop, before it named the self-service dining hall at school.

principal

A common memory trick says the principal is your pal, a nod to the word's old meaning of chief or main.

In their words