This month’s Puzzle Corner activity has an ocean theme. In it, students are presented with a number of anagrams. Anagrams are words or collections of words whose letters are rearranged to form new words or collections of words. For example, an anagram for canoe is ocean.
Anagrams have a long history in the puzzle community. Lewis Carroll, who was really the 19th century mathematician Charles Dodgson, was an inveterate puzzler, and anagrams formed a signi�cant part of his repertoire. Anagrams and puzzles also play an important role in some of his books, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
This activity presents a number of words or phrases whose letters are to be rearranged to form new words or phrases that are somehow related to oceans. The �rst page contains the words or phrases to be rearranged. The number of lines appearing after the original anagram indicates the numbers of words in the rearranged anagram. A second page providing hints is given to keep students (and possibly their teachers) from getting too frustrated. You may want to let students work on the anagrams for a little while before giving them the page with the hints.
Ocean Anagrams (187k PDF file)
I hope that you and your class find the anagram activity enjoyable.