'Wordle' for you!

I wish I had ‘Wordle’ when I was teaching in the classroom, “word clouds” from text that you provide. Thank you, Jonathan Feinberg for creating this simple, pleasurable tool for children (and teachers) to use when motivating competency in spelling.

There are ways to utilize ‘Wordle’. Children can check their own mastery of spelling from a created ‘word cloud’ (dictionaries may come to the fore in this scenario) or teachers can take a hard copy of a child’s ‘word cloud’ and write annotations; inserting the correctly spelt word and/or alternatives alongside the incorrectly spelt word. Latter, children decide which is correct. Children can also be directed to find ‘better’ words. All that is needed is for children to use is the word processor (I use MS Word) and write a piece (figure 1). They press the internet explorer icon and type in the web site www.wordle.net go to ‘create’ and copy/paste their piece in ‘a bunch of text’, press ‘go’ and a word cloud is printed. Wordle sets out the words in random order, with different sized font and colours.

I would not use ‘Wordle’ every day of the week as I know that face-to-face conferencing is a special time; a time when children see the value of re-reading and finding what went wrong in their continuous text. Working with a student is a time for building relationships, holding a discussion about how to improve writing (and spelling). But to vary the scene ‘Wordle’ is a fun activity and the children’s clouds can be added to the ‘Wordle’ gallery.

I have had a child’s ‘word cloud’ in my hand when discussing spelling attempts during conferencing.  And of course, you demonstrate to children how they look into the ‘word cloud’ to find their spelling errors. A good introduction to this is for the class to go outside and look into the clouds and see what shapes there are. Looking closely is an important part of spelling awareness.

Figure 1            An example of a child’s writing using MS Word:

We have just been to the zoo. The techr says that zoos have changd a lot  Animals usd to be in cages and look out thrugh bars and walk on conkret floors Now they live like they wood in their own world. The baboon must have hated looking out through bars. We went to where the animals food is put together. The part I didnot like was that some zoo animal eat live animals. That made me feel sick.

Open up Wordle www.wordle.net press Create and copy the child’s on-screen writing Paste the child’s writing into the text box. On the example hard copy (figure 2), I wrote annotations - some correct spelling, some alternatives to choose from, given a meaning, challenged the child to think again about his spelling and directed the child to an action verb.

Figure 2