Word Cloud for Art Lessons For Kids

Have you heard of Wordle, Tagul or Tagxedo? These sites help you create what is known as a word cloud from the content found on your blog, tweets, tags, or other sites you like. The more times a word is used in the content, the bigger the word is in the cloud.

I used Wordle because you don’t need to sign up for an account like Tagul and for some reason I couldn’t see my word cloud in Tagxedo. Tagxedo did look interesting though because you can add your word clouds onto products and buy them. All I had to do on Wordle was type in the Url for Art Lessons For Kids and the most frequently used words I have on this entire blog came out as one big word cloud. How awesome is this? I absolutely love that the word ‘students‘ stands out the most.  It’s all about them when I create my lessons so I am so happy the cloud reflected this.

Here are 5 other creative ways that you can use this fun tool in your classroom.

1. At the beginning of the year, ask your students to type in words to describe their feelings about art or write an essay and use this to create their word cloud. Print these off and save them. Do this again at the end of the year and see what changes have occurred throughout the year. Save them for their portfolios.

2. Your students can create word clouds for research projects about an artist, art movement, a particular work of art, etc. and display these around your classroom along with their finished art work.

3. You can make a cloud using words to describe you, your teaching philosophy (great for a resume), your classroom expectations/rules, supplies, you name it! and display it really creatively where your students will see it.

4. Make a word cloud with all of you fears and frustrations you currently have in your classroom. See what stands out the most and work on turning these into positives. Sometimes all it takes is to see and be aware of what bugs you to take action and fix it!

5. Save all you report card comments onto one document and use this to make a report card word cloud. This will help you see what words you are using the most and hopefully they will be caring and positive words. 🙂

And the most important way you should use a word cloud in my opinion is to:

6. Type in all the adjectives to describe what you love about teaching and what makes you the most wonderful art teacher ever. They can be words, sentences, thoughts, a poem or whatever you like and see what word cloud comes up. Stick this somewhere you will see it every day just as a little reminder when you are having one of those days. I’ll give you the first word you can use: inspiring…

I hope you start using word clouds and enjoy making them as much as I am. Use the share buttons below to let others in on the fun. Can you think of other great ways to use word clouds?

By The Way…

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