Do you like to say the words, Activity Books? Do you like all the puzzles and games found in Activity Books? Then you'll love comedy musician Mike Phirman's new album titled, "Activity Books". In this episode you'll get to hear one of the songs from his new EP, "Word Search/Vacuum", featuring the voice of Weird Al Yankovich, and you'll get to hear our funny and fabulous interview with Mike about how he became famous and about his unfortunate experience with a vacuum. Buttons & Figs kids will also share ways to wordplay, inspired by this fabulous album. Listen to the episode here.
After the episode, do the activity! See below for word search fun.
Buttons & Figs Word Search Activity
Do you like to say the words Activity Books? Do you like all the puzzles and games found in Activity Books? Then you'll love comedy musician Mike Phirman's new album titled, "Activity Books". In the Buttons & Figs episode, Nonsense Activities, you heard Mike’s song, "Word Search/Vacuum", featuring the voice of Weird Al Yankovich. Inspired by this song, you also heard Buttons & Figs kids Olivia and Sophia share a word search they created.
Here are the links to download Olivia and Sophia’ word searches*:
Olivia’s Wild Word Search
Sophia’s Word Search
Here’s how you can create a word search of your own:
What You Need
● A pencil or pen, or crayons or markers, something to write with
● Paper
● Ruler (optional)
Word Search Activity
1. Make a list of objects that might be sucked up by a vacuum...and be silly! Olivia has ‘elephant’ on her list of objects and Sophia has ‘finger’! You can include as many or as few objects as you’d like, Olivia and Sophia listed 5 to 6 objects.
2. Write out your objects, letter-by-letter, spacing all of your letters the same, as if they were in a row or column. Try to have some words going left, some going right, others going up or down or even diagonal. If some of your words have the same letters, then try to have your words cross over one another. Use Olivia’s and Sophia’s word searches as examples.
{optional} If you want to, you can use a ruler to create a word search grid for your words before laying them out in all directions in order to help keep the letters evenly spaced. This isn’t necessary, but sometimes this can help keep your letters from getting too wonky!
3. Once you have all of your words laid out with similar spacing between the letters, then fill in all the spaces with random letters. Keep going until you have a rectangle of letters in fairly even rows and columns.
To learn more about Mike Phirman's work and find all the ways to purchase the Activity Books EP at mikephirman.com
*You can find all activity downloads at buttonsandfigs.com