Thursday, April 30, 2009

Wordle in reading centers



I have been doing a lot of reteaching and reviewing to cram for the upcoming testing month. This has also helped with differentiating independent work in reading centers. Last week I tried to have the students type up their word family lists in a Word doc, then copy and paste them into Wordle. Not a surprise when my heterogeneous groups bombed at this task. So this week, I pulled out some "Centers Captains" (aka grade level students) to have a private training with Wordle and how I wanted this center to work. Alas, success!

My students took their writing journals to the computers center (yes! I finally have enough computers for a center!) and typed up the word lists we had brainstormed during whole group. When they had finished the Centers Captain helped them print their sheets. As predicted, this ended up being me jumping up from guided reading to help them all print- but still worth it.

During writing the students took their Wordle print outs and highlighted them according to short vowel families and long vowel families. They used a different color highlighter to represent the different vowel word lists. Short vowels proved to be easy (since we've covered them for so long) but long vowel lists were confusing and proved to be a difficult for the students (as you will see one is not very well color coordinated).

I am going to attempt to try this activity with the phonics standard each week. It proved to be fun, but less independent than I would have liked. We'll keep trying, practice makes perfect!




6 comments:

Joseph Miller said...

Thanks for the frank assessment. Were students proud?

Andrea said...

What a creative idea for using wordle. Thank you for sharing.

Lisa Kellogg said...

Kate,
This is a great new way to work on phonics and word families. I look forward to trying it out next year.
Thanks.

Anonymous said...

This is a wonderful idea. I am going to try doing this with word study words next week. Thank you for sharing. :-)

Kate Ibarra said...

The students were proud but mostly excited! They really enjoyed printing out their work and having a hard copy of their "play time" on the computer.

Angela Maiers said...

This is awesome! I am continually amazed at what can be done with this incredible tool!

If you want to add images to the mix- check this out. It adds a layer of visual literacy to the reading and writing work!

http://tinyurl.com/cavtvy