Fun With Words

It's our last week of spelling homework so I thought I'd share a favorite website that I was recently reminded of. :)

From the Wordle website: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give 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 yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

This word cloud was created using the words we collected as we read The Name of This Book is Secret. After you create your own Wordle, you may want to save it. You can print it out right away or save it to their public gallery. Another option is to do a screen capture so that you can save the Wordle as a picture file. There's no way to search for your Wordle so be sure to copy the web address before you move on to something else if you want to be able to find it again.

A fun thing to do with Wordle is to create a word cloud without a title and have a friend try to guess what it is about. Here's an example...

Can you guess what the title is?

(hint: this is something we do in class almost every week)

Wordle is a free website so I have a few cautions about it.

• Occasionally, the site seems to freeze up or otherwise not work. It may be helpful to type your words into a text file (in Word or a similar word processor) and then copy/paste them into Wordle. That way, you won't lose all of the text if you have problems with the website.
• Text on Wordle cannot be removed or censored. It is possible to come across word clouds that have inappropriate words in them - *Parents: see the FAQ section for filtering what your child has access to if you are concerned about this.* I have visited the site many times and haven't seen anything inappropriate yet.
• If you post to the public gallery, be sure that you haven't included anything you don't want shared with the whole world. *Kids - this includes using your whole name and anything that gives information about where you live! Always be safe when you are working online.

If you create a Wordle, please share it with us! It's fun to see what others create and gives us great ideas.

The Name of This Book is Secret...

We just finished reading another terrific chapter book, The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch. We loved it. I can't believe I didn't look for it sooner but I just discovered the website that goes with the books!



There are three more books in the series and I'm sure that if your child hasn't already asked you to buy them, you'll be getting those requests very soon. :) You can buy used copies on Barnes & Noble for as little as $1.99 or on Amazon for as little as $0.96!

The kids did some writing about the book so I thought I'd include some of their reviews here for you to read...

Luke's Review:

     The book was exiting and funny! These kids named Cass and Max-Ernest found this box that had different smells and then got into a mystery. After that they went to this house to try to solve this mystery.

More reviews coming soon!


If you little reader loves this series, the Lemony Snicket books are another great series to get into. You may be familiar with The Series of Unfortunate Events from the movie of the same name. Here's the website to peak some interest. Enjoy!

Trickster Tale Projects

We are working hard to prepare for this week's Education Celebration. It's an opportunity for us to share PBL (Project Based Learning) projects with LdV families and the community. The children in our class will be sharing their Trickster Tale Projects.

For this project, they are working with a partner to retell a favorite trickster tale and will perform a live shadow puppet show to go along with it. Their retells have already been recorded and the kids have been creating puppets and other props to use for their show.

We'll be finishing up the audio portion of the show by adding a bit of music to the beginning and end of each story. We are going to use Freeplay Music to find music that will help to give more information to the audience about what culture the story came from.

They are also working hard to prepare their shadow puppet shows. With all of their shadow makers ready to go, they are selecting just the right lighting and practicing different effects.

Here are a few of the sites we are using to help us understand what the show should (or could) look like:
Kennedy Center's Playing with Shadows
How To Do Your Own Shadow Puppetry Show
Richard Bradshaw: Shadow Puppeteer
Little Fables
Journey to Neverland Shadowography

Can't wait to see how all of this turns out! We'll have videos of the performances to share with you soon...


Here are a couple of quick videos from our experimentation with shadow puppets: