⏰ Byrdseed.TV's Winter Window closes at the end of this month. Check it out!

Byrdseed

  • Home
  • About
  • Archive
  • Best Of
  • Speaking
  • ByrdseedTV

Puzzle: Word Pyramids

In the past I’ve written about Lewis Carroll’s Word Ladders as a fun vocabulary puzzle. I picked up a used copy of A Book of Puzzlements and found an example of what I’ll call a Word Pyramid.

Here’s a Word Pyramid that goes from A to BRANDS:

A
AN
AND
BAND
BRAND
BRANDS

You add one letter at each level, and each level has to be a valid word.

What if you started with I? How far could you go?:

I
IS
HIS
THIS

Then, feel free to change the rules a bit:

  • What if you could delete one letter or add a letter?
  • What if you could rearrange the letters at each step?
  • What if you could only add to the front?
  • and so on…

Here’s a great final example from the book:

I
IT
TIE
SITE
TINES
INSERT
STAINER
GRANITES
ASSERTING
SIGNATURES

Can you (or your students) figure out the rules to this Word Pyramid?

Sometimes the best form for these puzzles is just to let students play with them rather than giving strict rules. See what they can come up with!

Get creative ideas in your inbox.

I'll send you one or two emails a month to help you better understand and differentiate for gifted students.

Get free resources now!

More about Vocabulary
  1. Language Arts Needs Of Gifted Learners
  2. Mega Homophone List
  3. 111 Greek and Latin Word Parts
  4. Super Idiom List
  5. Researching Idiom Origins
  6. Ideas for Idiom Activities
  7. Puzzle: Word Ladders
  8. Puzzle: Words Within Words
  9. 125 Homographs and Homonyms
  10. Garden Path Sentences
  11. Weekly Lists of Common Foreign Vocabulary
  12. Jabberwocky, Parts of Speech, and Context Clues
  13. Ambiguous Sentences
  14. Challenge Students With Homographs & Homonyms
  15. Multiple Meaning Matcher
  16. Exploring Palindromes in ELA and Math
  17. Puzzle: Antonym Paths
  18. Puzzle: Word Pyramids

Get In Touch

Please contact me with questions or comments at: ian@byrdseed.com

Want to share something? Everything written here is licensed as CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted. What does this mean?


Privacy Policy • Disclosure



Copyright © 2009 - 2019 Byrdseed, LLC