Bio Word Clouds

Our class has been working to better use descriptive language in our writing.  Sometimes we use worksheets to practice using adjectives, but that is often tedious, and students fail to transfer what they have learned into actual practice.  To get us started, we brainstormed words to describe ourselves.  I had students think of words that describe their appearance, words that describe their personality, words that describe their interests, and words that describe their values and beliefs  We partnered up to get feedback and advice from others.  After we had our initial lists, we worked on correcting spelling.

Using an on-line word cloud generator, we typed in our first names, and the list of words. We used Tagxedo.  From there it was a matter of selecting a layout, font, and color scheme.  We saved the finished word cloud to our computers as a jpg.  I was amazed how quickly students picked up the necessary skills. 

Our next step will be to embed them in our Kidblogs.  Then I will ask students  to write a paragraph or two describing themselves, using many of these words.