Synonym worksheets

Synonyms are how a piece of writing stops saying “big” four times in a paragraph, and that is worth doing before anybody hands a child a thesaurus. A thesaurus offers twenty words for “big” of which three are usable by a nine-year-old; a page of pairs offers one, and it is one they can actually reach for. Every word on the right of this sheet is one a primary child can use without sounding like a dictionary.

Matching rather than writing is the right shape for this one, because the pairing is the whole content. There is nothing to spell here and no rule to apply — the question is whether two words mean the same, which is a judgment about meaning and the first properly semantic exercise on this shelf. Say the pairs in a sentence if one looks doubtful: two words mean the same when swapping them leaves the sentence true.

The answers were decided when the sheet was built, so the key is the same page with them drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: ten of them — rhyme, syllables, word families, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms — and each is asked in whichever of the three shapes suits it, written on a ruled line, circled from four, or joined up in two columns. How many questions and how many columns are switches beside them.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

Word Jungle deals the sight-word lists as flash cards: the word is read aloud, in a sentence, and typed back — which is the half of spelling a worksheet cannot do, because paper cannot say a word out loud. A child who has just worked through a page is the one likeliest to race it, and the record book then knows which words they keep missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.