Wordle is Wow!

I have been playing with Wordle and Tagxedo. What a great activity! I had so much fun. I can imagine that students will love this. Wordle is very easy to use. You simple copy and paste your text, and then you can play with the font, color, and layout. Tagxedo allows the user to create a custom shaped Wordle design. It is not as user friendly as Wordle, but with a little bit of playing, I was able to create a baseball-shaped Tagxedo using my son's report on his team's run in the playoffs a couple of years ago. The best part was that I had a great time creating my designs.

Here are the links to my Wordles:



my delicious tags and my daughter's report on Roger Sherman

multi-dimensional reading

A colleague of mine has been using Google Earth with her students this year. They use it in their reading groups to follow the characters' travels in the books that they read. I thought, what a wonderful way to help the reading come alive for the students!





And this got me thinking. Why not do the same thing in my own personal reading? I love to read historical fiction, mainly books that deal with English history. Right now I am reading The King's Grace, by Anne Easter Smith, which tells the story of the two princes in the Tower during the reign of Richard III. I have for a long time recorded the interconnectedness of the historical figures that I encounter. I have a large family tree, which helps me keep track of how each is related to one another, and I use it to even connect historical figures from one book to another. I also like to use Wikipedia as another source to add background to my reading.





But now I am thinking that I need to add a new dimension to my reading. I want to try following my characters' travel through Google Earth. How wonderful it will be to know where Middleham is in relation to Westminster Palace or Sheriff Hutton, for example. And who knows. One day I might just have the opportunity to actually visit some of these places!

Great Expectations

This past week I had my Kindergarten classes right after they had returned from a field trip to the aquarium. I should have known better! It had already been a long day for these little girls, and now they were coming to me for the last bit of their day. I was excited to hear about their trip, so as a "fun" activity, I asked the first group to draw, using KidPix, something that they saw that day at the aquarium.

At first they were very excited, but soon I started to hear the whines and frustration, "this is too hard" and "I can't do it". A couple of them were trying, but most were either staring at a blank screen or had given in to the urge to scribble and explore outside the assignment. I tried to encourage them by saying, "just try" and "it doesn't matter if it doesn't look like a real ____" (fill in the blank with your favorite water creature). After several minutes of encouraging them, it was nearly time to go.

One student had actually managed to write her name and scratch out a small image, although I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I congratulated her, and asked her if she wanted to print it. She did, so we did. As I handed the paper to her, I continued through the room asking girls to close out of KidPix and logout. I turned just in time to see the young student staring at her paper while bursting into tears. When I asked her what was the matter, she replied, "this doesn't look like an octopus!"

Well, lessons learned. First, don't ask 5 year olds to try anything new at the end of an extra long day. Second, 5 year olds, unless they are ahead of the curve or just immune to the results, are not able to draw using a mouse. After all, they are just getting used to paper and pencil. Lastly, just because a teacher says "good job", doesn't mean a student will value the effort.

The next Kindergarten group that day worked on drawing lines and circles. They were confident and successful!