Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Preschool fun”
A gentle direction — no specifics.
Closer — the category is coming into focus.
Near-direct — only read if you’re stuck.
Direction only.
Getting closer.
Near-direct.
7 theme words — lengths in random order
Spaces not counted in total
All theme words — shuffled
These words fit the theme on the surface, but aren’t part of today’s solution. Knowing them ahead of time can save you minutes of searching.
The most obvious early-years action word that isn't here; it fits the clue's mood so well that solvers keep circling back to it.
Feels unavoidable in any list of what small children do at speed, which is exactly why it turns into a dead end.
A nursery-age favourite and a perfect length for the grid, so it reads as a near-miss rather than an outsider.
A classic toddler word that seems certain to appear until the letters refuse to line up in a usable path.
a textbook decoy
The 4.6 sits where it does because "Preschool fun" hands you a mood but no grammar, so the first word usually arrives by accident rather than deduction — SKIP and MARCH tend to fall first, simply because they're the loudest things a nursery teacher says. Once those two are placed, the search space shrinks fast: every remaining answer has to be a way of travelling across a room, and GALLOP and WALK follow almost immediately. SPIN and TIPTOE are the two that break the pattern, since neither is strictly about getting from A to B, and they're what converts a hunch into a confirmed category. The spangram looked scarier than it was — fifteen letters sounds brutal, but three short everyday words mean the path is long rather than obscure, and the middle article is easy to spot and then extend in both directions. What genuinely slows solvers down is that HOP, RUN and DANCE feel more inevitable than half the real entries.
"Preschool fun" is a deliberately loose clue: it points at the mood and the setting rather than at grammar. The real hook is that all seven answers are things a teacher calls out during a movement break — the kind of game where everyone copies the child at the front. FOLLOW THE LEADER is that game named outright, which turns the clue from a vibe into a set of instructions. Once you picture a nursery room, the cheerful little verbs practically recite themselves.
The clever editorial move is that nothing in the set is a toy, a song, or a game title — the puzzle sticks strictly to the verbs of a group movement session. That makes the theme narrower than "preschool" and far more specific: each entry is a way of getting across a room. FOLLOW THE LEADER then works as the container for all seven, which is why the set feels like a single classroom moment rather than a random word list.
