Verbal Reasoning · Hidden Words
Hidden Word Lens
A 3-letter word is hiding across the join between two neighbouring words. Slide the lens along the sentence to find it.
Free to use and free to share. There is no sign-up, no score, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. What you may do with it, in full.
Loading the interactive exercise. Nothing you do here is saved or scored.
Why this works
Run the letters of "jump eagerly" together and you get "jumpeagerly", and "pea" is sitting right there, starting inside "jump" and finishing inside "eagerly". That is the whole trick of hidden words: the spaces are a disguise. Ignore them, sweep a 3-letter window along the letters, and check every join between two words. Work along the sentence one join at a time rather than staring at the whole line: the join between "jump" and "eagerly" is the one that pays off here.
Helping a child through Hidden Word Lens
Hints, least revealing first
- Close up the gaps in your head and read the sentence as one long string of letters.
- The word you want is never inside a single word. It always starts in one word and finishes in the next.
When they finish it: “Found it!”
11+ skill this exercise practises
It has its own page, with a worked example on it.
All verbal reasoning 11+ skillsYou can reuse this. Here is exactly how far that goes
Tutors, teachers and editors keep asking, so this is the answer in writing rather than by email. You do not need to ask permission, and you do not need to tell us.
- Embed it
- Put the exercise inside your own page with the code above. It stays playable, and it keeps working when we improve the engine behind it.
- Print it
- Print the page, or print the exercise off the screen, and hand out the copies. No limit on how many.
- Use it in class
- One child or a full set, in a school, in a tutoring session, in a homework club, or at the kitchen table.
- Put it in something you charge for
- A paid course, a paid tutoring session, a paid workbook, a members-only site. You owe us no fee and you do not need to ask.
- Reuse it in your own writing
- Quote it, rewrite it, translate it, cut it up, or build something different on top of it. Treat the wording, the worked examples and the question ideas as yours to work with.
The one thing we ask is a link back to the page you took it from, so a reader can find the live, playable version and the rest of the 11+ skills next to it. That is a request, not a condition: nothing above depends on it.
This covers the interactive exercises and the teaching notes on these 11+ pages. It does not cover the Trace Learn name or logo, and it does not let you present your version as something Trace Learn published.
Embed this exercise
Paste this into your own page and the exercise runs there, playable, for your readers or your students. It is 900 pixels tall by default and as wide as the column you put it in; change the height if your layout wants a different one.
The embedded copy has no header, no footer and no sign-up prompt. It records nothing about the child using it, on your page just as on ours.
Hidden Word Lens practises one skill. Verbal Reasoning has 26 of them
A free diagnostic covers every verbal reasoning skill and the other three subjects, and comes back with a shortlist rather than a list.