Psychology Basics for Teens word search, scramble and crossword puzzle

Psychology Basics for Teens word search, scramble and crossword puzzle

I made this psychology basics puzzle set for my 4th and 5th graders during our introduction to the mind and behavior unit. The kids had all sorts of questions about why people act the way they do, but they had no idea what words like psychology, behavior, cognition, or mental health actually meant in a scientific context. They also kept mixing up the different goals of psychology —who studies what and why. So I put together a word search, a word scramble, and a crossword using foundational terms like psychology, behavior, cognition, hypothesis, theory, scientific method, psychologist, psychiatry, emotion, perception, motivation, consciousness, conditioning, memory, development, personality, stress, mental health, and therapy. I also threw in a few like "empathy," "identity," "unconscious," and "conditioning" because they kept coming up in our class discussions about how we learn and why we feel the things we do .

The PDF is four pages. Three puzzles plus one answer key page. The word search works well for quiet time after recess, and the scramble gets them talking because they argue about the spelling of "psychology" (it's a tricky one with that silent 'p') or whether a psychologist and a psychiatrist are the same thing (they're not—one is a medical doctor who can prescribe medication, the other has a doctorate in psychology and focuses on therapy and research, and the kids always have opinions about it). The crossword I use for partners or as a review, and I usually have a simple "What is Psychology?" anchor chart or a list of the major perspectives—biological, behavioral, cognitive, developmental, social, and humanistic—nearby for the kids who need the visual support to connect the words to the concepts . I also added a couple simple brain, speech bubble, and magnifying glass drawings but nothing too busy.

Works for 4th through 6th grade. Print and go. Sometimes I have early finishers pick one word from the puzzles and write a sentence about what psychology means in their own words on the back, or I ask them to name one thing they'd like to learn about the brain. The kids actually ask for these now.