Guess the Wordle

This site, Guess the Wordle, by @jenwagner, is a great site to use with your students every day. A new wordle is posted online every Monday-Friday. Each wordle will have a topic and the students must figure out the topic for the day's wordle.

Each wordle in January deals with vocabulary. Each day you will see synonyms for grade level words. One way to use this tool is to have it displayed as students arrive each morning, then work with your class to find the answer! To find the answer to the wordle, simply hover your arrow over the wordle and the answer will appear. Challenge your students to think about the answer for the wordle before giving up!

This site really encourages students to think! Another great feature is that Jen archives past Guess the Wordle challenges, so if your students love it (and I think they will), you have more to choose from than the one for today!

Give it a try! You can start Monday with your class! Then, challenge your students to create wordles for their classmates to guess.

Word Cloud Choices

Word Cloud from ABCya!

Today I wanted to share a few sites that our 1st-3rd grade students use to create word clouds.

First, let's look at Wordle. Wordle describes their site as "a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The cloudsgive greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yoursto use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Wordle allows you to keep phrases of words together by using a tilda between the two words you don't want separated (~). This is helpful to know before using this tool with your students. Wordle also lets you choose various fonts and color schemes as well as orientation of your words.

Jen Wagner has a great site called Guess the Wordle that is great to use with students on a daily basis.

Here is a description of this site:

"Every day (Monday – Friday) a new wordle will be posted for you and your students to view.
Each wordle will have a TOPIC and you will need to use your diciphering skills to figure out exactly what that topic is. (feel free to use the tools of the internet to figure out the topics)
Monday & Wednesday Wordles
Monday’s Wordle will be easy. All the words will have ONE thing in common.
Wednesday’s Wordle will be a bit more complex. All the words will have TWO things in common.
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday Wordles
Tuesday’s Wordle will be the date of a famous event in world history.
Thursday’s Wordle will be the title of a book, poem, song, fable, etc.
Friday’s Wordle will be a famous location."


Another great site for word clouds is from ABCya! This is a little more user friendly for younger students than Wordle. This site also allows changing the font, orientation of words, and color scheme. One different I really like about ABCya! is that you can save your word cloud as a jpeg to post on a blog or wiki site with one click!


Check out these 2 sites and let your imagination go wild! I think your students will love it. I know ours have enjoyed using this great tool!

President Ideas

Our 2nd grade has always done a unit on Presidents called Yipes Stripes. Each year, we look for new ideas to incorporate into this unit. In the past, 6th graders have helped each 2nd grade boy (we are an all boys' school) create a powerpoint slide about their assigned president. The slides are then combined and the teachers play the slideshow in their classroom on Yipes Stripes day. This year, we are not doing a powerpoint slide. The 2nd grade teachers have seen glogster and each 6th grader will now help each 2nd grader create a glog about their president. We will then save their glog as a diigo bookmark and save it to a list under each teacher's name. Once all the glogs are on the diigo list, we will "play as webslides" off the diigo page and that will be each classroom's slideshow that plays for parents. I am very excited about the possibilities since the boys can work on this at home (with parent approval, of course!)

Another idea I had while driving home from school was a Presidential Wordle. Each boy can create a wordle of his assigned president's inauguration speech. This will help each student quickly see what was popular and important during the time of his assigned president. I just shared this with the teachers today and I think a few may use it. I found a link of the president inauguration speeches and the boys just need to copy the text from their president's speech, then paste it in to the wordle create page. The larger the words, the more the president used that word. Can't wait to see if anyone uses that idea and how the students react. The wordle pictured here is James Monroe's first inauguration speech turned into a wordle.