puzzPrintable animal word search for kids
Animals is the theme children ask for first, and it is the easiest one to build a good word search from: animal names are concrete, most are short enough for a small grid, and nearly every child already recognises them in print. These three grids are all drawn from one curated animal list, so the whole pack hangs together for topic work or a zoo trip.
The grids are at easy setting — 7x7, five or six words, across and down only — which makes this the best themed pack for the youngest solvers. The list mixes the familiar (TIGER, PANDA, HORSE) with British garden and countryside animals (BADGER, OTTER, HEDGEHOG) rather than defaulting entirely to safari species.
What is in this pack
| Theme | animals — wild, farm, garden and countryside | |
|---|---|---|
| Grid | 7x7 letters, easy setting | |
| Words hidden | five or six per puzzle | |
| Directions | across and down only | |
- Four A4 pagesThree puzzles, then a full answer key. Print the first three only if you would rather keep the answers.
- One verified solution eachEvery puzzle is passed through a solver and discarded unless exactly one answer fits.
- No sign-up, no watermarkA direct PDF download. No email address, no account, nothing to dismiss.
- Free to photocopyUse them at home, in a classroom, at a childminder or in a holiday club.
Teaching tip. Pair this with a trip. Ringing OTTER on the sheet in the car on the way to a wildlife park, then seeing one, does more for a five-year-old than the puzzle alone ever could.
How to solve a word search
There is a method beyond staring, and children who learn it get dramatically faster.
- Read the word list firstLook at the list before touching the grid. Pick one word to hunt for rather than trying to spot all of them at once — searching for a single target is far faster than scanning for anything at all.
- Hunt the first letter, not the wordChoose the word you want, then sweep the grid for just its first letter. Every time you land on one, glance at the neighbouring letters to see whether the second letter follows. Most letters are ruled out in under a second.
- Start with the longest wordsLong words are much easier to spot and, once ringed, they cut the grid down for everything else. Working longest-first also means the hardest finds happen while the child is still fresh.
- Check every direction the grid allowsEasy grids hide words across and down only. Medium grids add both diagonals, and tricky grids also run words backwards, upwards and diagonally up. If a word will not appear, it is nearly always running in a direction the child has not thought to look in yet.
- Ring it and cross it offDraw a loop round each word in the grid and strike it off the list at the same time. Keeping the two in step stops the frustrating end-game of re-hunting a word that was already found.
Who this pack suits
See the age guide on the word search page for how this pack compares to the others.
How the word search packs compare
| Word Search pack | Ages | What it asks of them |
|---|---|---|
| Easy, 7x7 | 5-7 | Five or six short words, across and down only. Nothing backwards, nothing diagonal. |
| Medium, 9x9 | 7-9 | Seven or eight words, and diagonals appear for the first time. |
| Tricky, 11x11 | 9-12 | Nine or ten longer words, running in all eight directions including backwards. |
| Themed packs | 5-9 | A single subject per pack — good for topic work, a party or a rainy afternoon. |
Questions about this pack
Which animals appear in these puzzles?
They are drawn from a curated list of around two dozen kid-friendly animals — tiger, zebra, monkey, giraffe, elephant, rabbit, panda, horse, donkey, badger, fox, otter, squirrel, hedgehog, kangaroo, penguin and more. Each puzzle uses five or six of them.
What age is the animal word search for?
Five to eight. It uses the easy 7x7 setting, so it suits children who are still letter-matching as much as reading.
Can I get an animal word search at a harder level?
Not as a themed pack, but the medium and tricky general packs draw from the same theme lists and will include animal grids among their puzzles. For an older child, start there.
Are British animals included, or only exotic ones?
Both. The list deliberately includes badgers, foxes, otters, squirrels and hedgehogs alongside the zoo favourites, so British children see animals they might actually meet.
More free worksheets
Other word search packs
Other kinds of puzzle
See all 17 free worksheet packs.
Hundreds more of these in the app
Puzzeroo is an iPhone and iPad app with two hundred word search levels alongside three other puzzle types — eight hundred in total, all generated by the same verified engines that made this worksheet, all working fully offline with no adverts and no accounts. The worksheets and the app draw from completely separate puzzle ranges, so printing these gives nothing away.