Did you know that the first full week in May is Teacher Appreciation week? I’m not sure when it became an official “thing”, but it’s been fun brainstorming and getting things together for both MaM and the Fox’s classroom teachers.
While I was mulling over what to do, I had a burst of inspiration. And since it doesn’t happen often, I thought I’d share.
One thing I think most teachers enjoy (I know I did) is receiving sentiments from their students. One of my most favorite momentos ever is from a little girl who drew a picture of the two of us, and her dad wrote the story about it on the back. I wanted to coordinate sentiments from the Fox’s entire class- and all of a sudden it came to me. WORDLE.
The school administrator took the time to have each child say what they liked best about each teacher.
1) I created a word doc that included all of the quotes from all of the children, including their names.
2) I pasted that document into the text box on the wordle.net website.
3) I played around with the Wordle text by pressing “randomize” and tweaking the color and the font until I hit upon what I wanted.
4) I saved the file by selecting print, and then instead of printing, I saved it as a PDF.
5)I I printed the PDF on photo paper, and popped it in a 8 x 10 frame.
Viola!
What was really amazing about this project was that the words that “popped” on each teacher’s Wordle were dead-on. The teacher who spends time outside and teaches art had outside, monkey-bars, art, and paint in large type. The teacher who practices sight words with the children, sings songs and prepares snack had words like read, sings, and snack were the largest words on her word cloud. I can’t wait to give them to the teachers next week!
Wondering what you can do if you can’t get the whole class to contribute quotes?
a) Include the teacher’s name, and the class roster
b) Include the subject, along with special projects or unit themes that have been covered
c) Include reading lists, people studied, or lists of other topics covered
The possibilities are endless- have fun thinking of groups of words that might work for the special teacher in your life. He or she will appreciate it.
This is SO cool! Thank you so much!