Giving the Wordle a whirl

The word cloud below, generated in Wordle, was created from the I AM poem I received yesterday from my 6th grade buddy, Thein, at Juanta Elementary.  This tech tool (Wordle) can be used to visualize texts.  It gives a snapshot of the most commonly used words in a document shown by the relative size of them in the cloud.   So for example, in Thein's poem, the words he used most frequently; neighborhood, big, grass, screen and tree are written in a larger font than the others.  This is very telling because when I asked him to introduce himself to me he mentioned that he loves to play video games as well as play in his backyard with kids around his neighborhood.  I'm planning to give him a copy of his "cloud" when I meet with him again next week. 

This is a very fun program.  I can think of many uses for it in my main placement, 1st grade classroom.  Currently,  we're studying families in social studies.  One of the main ideas being taught is that all families are unique but they also share many things in common.  To show the class what they share in common with one another I could load the responses from their worksheets about their families (what they like to do together, the holidays they celebrate, the number of siblings they have, whether they live in a house or apt., etc.).