🧲 How to Create a Word Magnets Activity

The Word Magnets template is a versatile, tactile tool that challenges students to assemble sentences, explore grammar structures, or categorise concepts. Unlike a traditional structured test, this activity acts like a physical whiteboard with magnetic tiles, keeping students engaged through hands-on arrangement and experimentation.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

• How is the Word Magnets activity played?
• How and what do you type into Edit content for Word Magnets?
• Where can I find some more examples?

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How the activity is played

The screen displays an open canvas featuring a scattered or grouped collection of textual magnetic tiles.

• The user clicks, taps, or drags the loose word magnets around the board to string them into a coherent sentence, categorise them under headings, or map out parts of speech.

• The objective is completely flexible and open-ended—ideal for sentence restructuring, spelling puzzles, syntactic modelling, or group brainstorm sessions.

• On the final screen, users can review their total configuration layout time and complete the activity space again.

  

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Creating your Word Magnets activity

1. Click Create Activity, search for Word Magnets, and select the template.

   

   
    

2. Add Your Content:

   • Magnet Items: Type individual words, punctuation marks, or phrases that you want to transform into moveable tiles.

   • Optional: You can add an image to any item to create visual prompt magnets or vocabulary-matching boards.

3. Click Add an item or press Enter to add more elements. The more items you add, the more creative your workspace canvas will be.

4. Click Done to save.

   
    

5. Scroll down to Visuals style to add a creative style to your activity, or tailor the difficulty in the Options panel below the activity:

   

   • Timer
     • None: Disables time limits completely, leaving the magnetic board completely open-ended so students can sort, rearrange, and experiment with sentence building at an independent pace.
     • Count up: Displays an ascending stopwatch tracker to observe exactly how many minutes or seconds a student needs to finish placing or grouping the word tiles (selected in the screenshot).
     • Count down: Imposes a strict, descending time limit (e.g., 5 minutes). The canvas interaction locks down if the countdown clock hits zero before completion.
   • Random
     • Shuffle item order: When checked, this scrambles the initial spawning positions of the magnetic text tiles across the canvas screen whenever the board is launched, ensuring students cannot rely on memory shortcuts from a previous run (unchecked/disabled in the screenshot).
   • Saving options
     • Apply to this activity: Saves these specific countdown and randomisation rules only for the single active file layout you are currently working on.
     • More: Click this drop-down to open advanced configuration management rules:
       • Set as default for template: Remembers these visual style settings and choice parameters as your uniform baseline default layout for every future project you build using the Word Magnets template.
       • Revert to default: Clears out temporary layout modifications and restores parameters back to your previously saved custom defaults.
       • Revert to author's setting: Discards manual updates to restore the parameters back to the initial configurations locked in by the original creator of a shared community board.

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Creating Word Magnets with AI

You don't need to be a prompt expert to use our AI. It is designed to be intuitive and accessible directly from the activity creator.

1. Click Create Activity and select Word Magnets.

   

   
    

2. Look for the ✨ Generate with AI button at the top right of the content table.

   
    

3. Enter your content:

   • Topic: Type a thematic focus like "Scrambled Sentence Starters" or "Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives."

   • Text / Notes: Paste your summary sentences, grammar frameworks, or paragraphs. The AI will segment the sentences into individual words and punctuation tokens, populating your magnet row targets automatically.

   • File: Upload a PDF or Word doc. Wordwall AI will analyse your lesson reading content, instantly parsing structural components into moveable magnetic word blocks.

4. Click Generate. Review the created magnet entries list, manually edit or add any custom symbols if necessary, and hit Done.

   

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Need inspiration?

Some examples of Word magnets activities have been created by our users and shared with the Wordwall resource community.