Valentine’s Day Codes

Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.

Word Ladder: Fly to Bee (6-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder: Wild to Tame (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Words Within Words: PATRICK

How many words can you find within Patrick?

Words Within Words: RAINBOW

How many words can you find within rainbow?

Words Within Words: COBWEB

How many words can you find within COBWEB?

Words Within Words: WREATH

How many words can you find within WREATH?

Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)

Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.

Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)

Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!

Words Within Words: GENERAL

How many words can you find within “general”?

Words Within Words: TEACHER

How many words can you find within TEACHER?

Words Within Words: AIRPLANE

How many words can you find within airplane?

Word Ladder: Kid to Old (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder: Sky to Red (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder – Sun to Hot (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder: Fire to Warm (4 Steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Jotto

Who can guess the codeword first?

Ghost

Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.