Cloze Maker — make printable fill-in-the-blanks worksheets for your class

A free-to-try cloze maker for the classroom

Cloze Maker turns any passage into a fill-in-the-blanks sheet. Type what the lesson is about and it writes the passage; then you click any word to punch it out into a gap. Print it with a word bank and an answer sheet, or put it on the board and fill the gaps together.

How to make a cloze worksheet

  1. Type what the lesson is about, pick a ready-made passage, or paste your own text.
  2. Set the age of your class and how many gaps you want: 6, 10 or 16.
  3. Read the passage back, and tweak it if it's not quite right.
  4. Click any word to remove it. Click a hidden word to put it back.
  5. Choose whether to show the word bank, then print the sheet — or press Launch to do it together on the board.

Typing your own passage and printing it is free and unlimited. Generating one with AI uses a token, and every account gets free tokens to spend.

What is a cloze passage?

A cloze is a piece of text with words removed, which the reader fills back in. The gaps aren't random — you choose them, so you decide whether the task is about vocabulary, key terms, connectives or comprehension.

It's one of the few activities that reads and writes at the same time. To fill a gap correctly you have to understand the sentence around it. It's also called a gap-fill or a fill-in-the-blanks activity.

How many words should you take out?

Fewer than you think. A gap every seven or eight words turns reading into guessing, because there isn't enough text left to work from. Choose 6, 10 or 16 gaps to start with, then click individual words to change which ones they are — so you can pull out the terms that actually matter and leave the rest of the sentence to carry them.

The age setting matters more than the number of gaps. Set the age band and the passage comes back with vocabulary pitched at the class, so the same topic can be a sheet for seven-year-olds or one for sixteen-year-olds.

How do you make sure it teaches the right words?

List them before you generate. Open Words that must appear under the topic box and type your topic vocabulary — evaporation, condensation, precipitation. Every one of them gets written into the passage and hidden first, so the prose is generated for you but the technical words are still yours.

Should you give a word bank?

Give it the first time, then take it away. With the bank showing, the task is recognition and placement — every child can start, and nobody sits looking at a blank line. Hide it and the same passage becomes recall, which is much harder.

That's the cheapest differentiation in the app: one class, one passage, half the sheets printed with the bank and half without.

How do you get a class started?

Do the first few gaps with them. The Launch screen puts the passage on the whiteboard and reveals answers one at a time, so you can talk through why a word fits before anyone picks up a pencil.

Most children don't need the activity explained. They need the first bit done, and then they're away.

From the classroom

I used this twice on the same Tuesday. Once with a secondary science class, and once in a staff meeting — passage up on the screen as an icebreaker while people trickled in after a long day.

That's the thing I didn't expect. Younger children love it because the answers are right there and the job is to read and place them. Older children love it for exactly the same reason, just with harder terminology, and the age setting handles that for you. The activity doesn't change; the vocabulary does.

Children also love watching you do it. Fill the first two gaps yourself on the board, thinking out loud, and a surprising number of them only needed that five or ten percent to get going. It ends up in my week at least once — a starter, a plenary, or the main activity.

Can I use my own text?

Yes. Choose Write Your Own and paste any passage — a paragraph from your reading book, a science explanation, a history extract — and it becomes a cloze. It runs in the browser on a Mac, PC, Chromebook or tablet, with nothing to download.

Which subjects does it suit?

Anything where the words themselves are the content. Science explanations, history recounts, geography processes, grammar and spelling patterns, comprehension, and vocabulary revision before a test. Because the age setting runs from the youngest readers up to sixteen-plus, the same activity works for a class just learning to read for meaning and for one revising exam terminology.

Printing

The PDF prints the pupil sheet with the word bank, and a separate answer sheet for you, marked so it doesn't get handed out by mistake. Long passages carry across more than one page rather than shrinking the text.

Written by a practising primary school teacher.

Related apps

Revising the same vocabulary? Try the Crossword Maker or the Word Search Maker — or turn the words and their meanings into a self-marking puzzle with Tarsia Maker.