Loved that lesson! Technology Edition.

My friend Meg over at The Teacher Studio hosts this awesome linky each month.  I always find such amazing ideas from other fantastic teacher bloggers.  This month I decided to do a bit of a throw back and write about a lesson from last year. (You can read more about how I used the novel Wonder HERE.)  I love the novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio.  Last year I wrote a blog post about all the fantastic things we did before, during and after reading the novel.  One of my favourite projects was making "Character Trait Images" using Tagxedo.

You've never heard of Tagxedo?  I love this program.  It allows you to make sophisticated word clouds via the Internet.  Using Tagxedo is super easy.  Want something to use with your students?  You can find an easy to follow tutorial in PDF HERE.

Go to the Tagxedo homepage and click on CREATE.

You will see a page that looks like the one above.

Click on LOAD. Here you (or your students) will add text.  For our Wonder assignment, the students brainstormed character traits about each of the characters in the novel.  

Next, click on SHAPE. You can choose from a variety of shapes which are pre-made OR you can click on ADD IMAGE.  This is how my students were able to create the Character Trait images from the novel.  The students created sketches of the characters from the novel.  I uploaded them to a site on our school server so the students could access them easily.  They were able to upload the images to Tagxedo and create custom word clouds.

Finally you can change aspects of your image by clicking on color, theme, font, orientation, or layout.  Students were encouraged to experiment and choose designs they found visually appealing.  

Next you can save your images as JPGs or PNGs.  I had the students create a folder and download all of their individual images. I then taught them how to use the on line photo editor Picasa.

We downloaded the program to our computers at school and showed students how to create collages using their Tagxedo images.

Below you can see some finished student work.  I was really proud of how well my students persevered to complete this assignment.  I think their Tagxedo collages turned out brilliantly don't you?

If you are reading the novel Wonder with your class, or if you would just like a great FREEBIE...click on the image below to download the bookmark I made for my students.  I printed them on card stock, cut them out and laminated them.  I love the sentiment expressed by R.J. Palacio...imagine what the world would be like if we all "choose kind".

Thanks for reading.  Feel free to message me if you have any questions about how we completed this project. 

Father's Day Ideas...you can save them for next year!

I wasn't going to write a post about what we did for Father's day this year...I thought there were probably a LOT of great ideas already going around...and we didn't get it finished until the end of the day on Friday!  BUT...they turned out so well I can't help but show them to you.

A few months ago I was walking around (read: picking up tons of stuff I have no idea what I will do with but I MUST HAVE) at Dollar Tree when I saw some plain wooden frames.  I snatched up a class set of them, knowing I would come up with something to use them for.

Fast forward a few weeks...I keep seeing really cute pictures on Facebook of students with their names on them in fonts.  You have probably seen these pictures too...the kids are standing against a brick wall and they have information superimposed on top of the picture.  I thought to myself "that would be an awesome father's day gift!"  I knew I could have the kids paint the frames and then I would put in a their picture as a gift for their dad.

I had the students enter in all the words they could think of to describe their father into WordArt.  They then chose an image from the list of pre-made images and created their word picture.  

Later in the week, I had the students use craft store acrylic paint to create a custom colour for their frame and we painted them using sponge brushes.  Acrylic paint is great in that it dries really quickly and the students were able to do more than one coat and have it dry in less than an hour.

We added the custom made WordArt word clouds to the custom painted frames and VOILA!

I hadn't intended to wrap the gifts for the students but they did such an amazing job that I went back to another local store (Dollarama) and purchased plain butcher paper gift bags and some red and blue tissue paper.