The following post has been imported from my original blog. Please excuse any references to Mrs. Patton’s Patch.
Although this time of the year can get very crazy very quickly, I find it important to do something special for my students at the end of the year.
One of my favorite things to do for my students is this end of the year gift:
I have each of my students tell me a word or multiple words to describe each of their classmates. (I would suggest having a word list of suggestions in case they get stuck.)
Then, I take their words and type them into a word cloud generator, making sure their name has the highest frequency, followed by the grade and year with the next highest frequency. After typing in all of the words, I play around with the colors until I get a color scheme I like, and then save the picture.
I put the pictures into PowerPoint and resize them so they will fit in a 4×6 frame. (I bought these frames from the Dollar Tree.)
Once they are printed and in the frames, I wrap it with twine, add a couple of fun pencils I have on hand, and add a cute gift tag.
If you’d like the gift tag, download it below for free.
Some Notes on Word Clouds
If you are new to word clouds, it is important to understand how they work. After you type in text to the word cloud generator it makes the words different sizes based on the frequency. So, the more times a word is typed in, the bigger it is.
Also, if you have a phrase that you’d like to keep together, you need to add the tilde (~) in between the words. For example, if I wanted the word cloud to keep “hard worker” together, I would type it in as “hard~worker,” but this won’t show up on the final word cloud.
I like to use either tagxedo.com or wordclouds.com to design word clouds.
I hope your end of the school year is running smoothly!
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