Tamil Nadu - Tiruchi   

Learning the nitty-gritty of grids

— PHOTO: R.M. RAJARATHINAM

Right lexis: Resourceperson Punitha Natarajan interacting with the students in a Newspaper in Education session held at Sri Vignesh Vidyalaya, Koothur in Tiruchi.

TIRUCHI: What is the seven-lettered animal belonging to cat family? What is the synonym of ‘fatal?’ While there are a couple of answers for both the questions, the two has a common link – the words start with ‘L.’

The rectangle and square grids, tagged with clues, satisfy the literary craving of many readers of newspapers every morning. Students of Sri Vignesh Vidyalaya, Koothur, learnt more than solving word puzzles at the NIE session held recently.

‘History and characteristics of crossword,’ the first module of ‘Crosswords,’ dealt with basics of filling up the grids with agility. A New York-based newspaper was the first one to introduce the crosswords in its Christmas edition of the paper. Though it did not catch up with the people immediately, the trend of bringing out crosswords in newspaper began a decade later, the resource person of the session Punitha Natarajan told the students of class VI.

She drew a three-by-three grid over the blackboard, writing down the clues beside it. The students vied with one another to complete the grid with the right words.

“Crosswords are one way of building one’s vocabulary. It also helps you to pick out the right words at right time,” she said.

Two types of crosswords –general and thematic – egg on people to generate more words using a common thread, she listed out the resource materials needed to fabricate a crossword.

“Sit with dictionary, thesaurus, catalogue of anagrams, homonyms, homophones and encyclopaedia. Choose a theme and skim through them to find out the necessary words that suit the theme,” she said.

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