Anagrams of the World

Time

Puzzles & Quizzes

PDF Resource

4 3 2 1 Early-Mid Stages

Benefits

Participants

One to One, Self Led or Group Activity

What you need

A list of countries scrambled up - Download resource
A flipchart, whiteboard or a very large sheet of paper to pin to the wall
A space to hold the game (if you want to make it a group activity)

Intro

We love anagrams – unpicking letters to find the hidden words. They’re brilliant at encouraging cognitive thinking and can be played in a group with everyone sharing their thoughts. Or as a solo activity for individuals who prefer a bit of quiet time. You can also adjust the difficulty of the anagrams to suit different levels of ability.

The important thing is that people enjoy themselves, so if you do opt for a group game, keep it non-competitive. Getting everyone working together to find the answers is the perfect outcome!

Top tip

Scrambled words can look quite obscure, so if you want to play with a group at an exploratory level, why not keep the first and last letters the same and simply scramble the middle letters? For example, glnaedn (England) would be written as Egnlnad. It makes the answers that little bit easier to find.

The Activity

If you want to organise the game for one person, list all the anagrams on a sheet and attach them to a clipboard – then pass it to the person to play at their leisure. Or, if you’re gathering players for a group game, follow this simple process:

Gather the group in your game area
Place the flipchart, whiteboard or paper on the wall so that everyone can see
Write the scrambled country names on the board one at a time and ask the group to guess what each one is
Give a clue if you need to
Perhaps once the game has finished you could then encourage the person or group to share memories of countries that they have visited

PDF Resource