My Little Adventure with an Action Word Scramble
So, I got this itch the other day, you know? I wanted to make something, anything, just to keep the gears in my head from rusting. And what popped in? An ‘action word scramble’. Sounds simple, right? That’s what I thought too. Famous last words.
First things first, I grabbed a trusty old notepad and a pen. I always start things this way. Call me old-fashioned, but there’s something about sketching out ideas on paper that just clicks for me. I started thinking, what even is an action word scramble? Basically, jumble up some verbs and let someone try to fix ’em. Good for kids, or even just a quick brain teaser for myself, I figured.
My next step was getting the words. I needed a decent list of action words.
- I started just brainstorming: run, jump, eat, play, think, write. The basics.
- Then I actually opened a dictionary, believe it or not. Flipped through looking for good verbs.
- I wanted a mix, some easy, some a bit trickier. Not too obscure, though. Keep it fun, you know?
Once I had a list, maybe about fifty words to start, I thought about how to actually scramble them. My first genius idea was to just write each letter on a tiny piece of paper and shake ’em up in a cup. Real high-tech stuff, I tell ya. That worked for one word, but then I was like, “Man, this is gonna take forever if I want to do a bunch.” Plus, the cleanup! Little paper squares everywhere.
Trying to Get it Working
So, I moved to my computer. I’m no coding wizard, but I know a few tricks. I figured I could just type out the words and then manually mix the letters around. For ‘jump’, I’d type ‘pmuj’ or something. Seemed straightforward. But then, consistency became an issue. Was I scrambling them enough? Too much? It felt a bit random, and not in a good way.
I remembered there are ways to do this a bit more, let’s say, systematically. I spent a bit of time looking into simple ways to shuffle letters in a word. Nothing fancy, just something that would give me a jumbled version without me having to eyeball it every single time. It was a bit of a faff, to be honest. You’d think something so simple would be… simpler. But no, there’s always a catch, isn’t there?
Then came the presentation part. Okay, I have scrambled words. Now what? Just a list of gibberish? Nah. I wanted it to be a bit interactive, even if it was super basic. I decided to make a simple document. Scrambled word on one side, and then a blank space next to it for someone to write the answer. I even thought about making little boxes for each letter of the unscrambled word, but that felt like too much effort for this little project.
I printed out a test sheet. ‘pmju’ – blank. ‘kaet’ – blank. ‘nru’ – blank. I gave it to my nephew. He looked at it, then at me, then back at the paper. He got ‘run’ pretty quickly. ‘Jump’ took him a second. ‘Take’ (from ‘kaet’) he struggled with for a bit. That was good feedback. Some were too easy, some just right.
The whole thing wasn’t some groundbreaking invention, obviously. It was just a small exercise. But going through the motions, from that first little idea to having something tangible, even if it’s just a piece of paper with jumbled words, felt pretty good. It’s the process, you know? Thinking it through, hitting small snags, figuring out a simple way around them. That’s the fun part for me. And hey, my nephew learned a new word, or at least remembered how to spell ‘take’ properly.
