Gifts / Cards - Word Clouds

Bit late for this year UK teachers - sorry. But, you can start planning for next year...

For two and a half terms this year just gone we actually taught the same class. Mates, assistant heads, bloggers and job share teachers. Think we drove each other a little crazy at times. Anyway, come the end of the year we were thinking of a gift for the pupils in our class and this is what we came up with: 

Again this year, we undertook the summing up of each day in three words. At the end of the year we therefore had 190 X 3 words. We stuck these words into a word cloud generator, purchased some picture frames and hey presto, they look rather good. They certainly look like they cost more than 80p each to make! And, they're full of the children's thoughts, word choices and experience whilst in our class.

I hope that most of them will keep it and look back upon it fondly. And, as for 'english', we decided it looked good as a design choice - but it bugs me the more I look at it! There's the off typo/spelling error too... However, look which word came out top!

We'll three word blog again next year and may even use word clouds on Christmas, Mother's/Father's Day (and so on) cards too.

Word clouds from some previous years too.

Not all Displays are for Children (Part 2)

The Part 1 of this blog post came almost two years ago now. In December, we finally got around to putting something in place we'd been meaning to 'get around to' for a while. We wanted to place a display on the outside of our classroom for, other classes, parents, grandparents and general passers by to see (and interact with). We posted the picture below to our Twitter account.

The picture and idea was well received so we have decided to write about it in more than 140 characters.

The purpose of the display? Advertise what the class have been doing. Generate website / blog traffic. Show off a bit.

The first thing added was a word cloud. Each member of the class was asked for a sentence to describe their year so far. They only wrote positives. :-)

Next, some QR codes were added. These link to the class website (containing examples of work, recounts of events and photographs) as well as Padlet walls and other examples of children's online work. The QR Code provides a quick link for anyone with a mobile device and should the QR Code not work for any reason, each has a TinyURL below as a back up or alternative.

Our most recent addition is some augmented reality. Using Aurasma, we created a link to a slideshow of photos from a recent school trip. This is probably the 'show off bit'. 

When parents and other family members come into the classroom they look at displays, ask to see children's work and enjoy seeing what's being done. Now they can do it from outside and (if QR Codes are used) realise they can also do this from home.

We've since presented about this as part of a TeachMeet.

Create Your Own Word Banks

We've written before about Google Forms and how it can be used to generate vocabulary. This time we didn't rely on the kind people of Twitter, parents or colleagues to generate the words, we handed that over to our children. 

We provided them with these two links:

Bossy Verbs

 and

Interesting Adverbs

The children entered up to 10 words each. This generated over 1,000 words for each and we then made the result into word clouds to use during our instructional writing: 

Words for the children to use, by the children who will use them...

Google Docs - More Forms...

This is a follow up post to 'Google Docs - Forms' that we recently wrote.

We've been using Google Forms again for collecting information to help our class. This time, we have used it to aid our literacy teaching. With a writing lesson approaching we decided we wanted to help our children extend their vocabulary. So, we posted the question below on Google Forms:

We're looking for some help! Next week, we're writing Robin Hood stories set in a castle. Sometimes we find it difficult to think of adjectives and adverbs to use in our writing. If you can list some below it would really help us. Write as many as you can, even if it's just one!

The form can be found here.
 

Image credit: Screenshot from Google.com

We collected the words and shared them with our class to aid their writing. We shared the form with our followers on Twitter, through the school's websites and also emailed it to the children to ask their families to help. We had positive feedback from people who filled in the form saying they liked the challenge of coming up with words they thought would be useful and would extend our children's vocabulary. The results can be found here.

We also put the words into a word cloud:

Start Your Literacy Lesson With a Word Cloud

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Firstly, if you’ve not yet heard of or made word clouds before visit one of the websites below to start making them:

ABCya 

Tagxedo

WordItOut

Wordle 

We have recently been looking for ways to engage our Key Stage Two learners in improving their understanding of different word types. One way we’ve found to do this has been through the use of word clouds. At the beginning of some literacy lessons we have displayed a word cloud and then set the children the task of listing different types of words that they can find in the word cloud.

The example below contains nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. The children listed words they thought were examples of each. This lead to a discussion about why words were or were not a certain word type and also lead to discussing words like ‘sprout’, ‘stamp’ and ‘smoking’ that can at different times be classified as more than one of these.

This could also be carried out using time connectives, conjunctions, alternatives for said or contractions missing apostrophes that need adding and so on…

The word clouds are easily created by coping a list of words into the website. Below are examples of the four ideas listed previously:

Again, please feel free to add to this post by commenting below.