Pinterest and Adjective Word Clouds

 I think that for teachers, summer has a number of titles. For many of us, we could refer to these wonderful months as "Pinterest Season!" I don't know about you, but I have spent the last month organizing and cramming as many ideas for next year as possible. I'm so excited to have one central location where I can store and organize all of these goodies!

  Along the way, I have picked up many amusing or useful ideas. For example, did you know that spritzing a mixture of warm vinegar and dish soap on your tub will erase stains that two years of elbow grease and abrasive cleaning materials wouldn't fade? It's true!

I also find time to laugh:

  Some mischievous part of me things that this guy would make a great substitute teacher....


But I digress. 
There is one Pinterest idea that I was able to try before the end of the school year, and absolutely LOVED for my kids. There are SO many different ways that you can use this, and the great thing is--it can be used for pretty much any grade.


 I got the idea from the awesome teaching blog Confessions of a Teaching Junkie when I was looking for a supplement to my adjectives lesson. I just slightly modified it to fit my needs.


First we read this adorable book by Brian Cleary:

 

Then with a little bit of help, the kids filled out a sheet that I made for them. This is the one I used:

The kids only needed a little encouragement. One or two had to redo their sheet after writing "nice" for every student. The students were instructed not to write an adjective more than three times on the sheet. I also made sure that they knew we were writing "friendly" adjectives. After a little bit of revision, they came out with some super ideas. 

I did allow some flexibility. One little sweetheart came up to me and said that one of her friends reminded her of "sunshine". After discussion, I let her keep it!

I kept these precious papers and used them to surprise the kids with an end of the year gift. They turned out so cute!

These were so easy to make! The website I used is tagul.com. It is a website which generates "Word Clouds" of different shapes and content. I just printed them and bought frames at the Dollar Store.

The kids were so cute when I handed them out. At first they didn't know quite what to make of them (one of my girls asked "Why didn't you bring suckers instead, Mrs. Johnson? As Charlie Brown would say after spending two hours on this project, 'Good Grief!'). But by the end of the day, the frames were their new favorite possession. They compared each others' adjectives and discussed the words excitedly. Score! 

I will definitely be using these next year during our adjectives unit! You can make all sorts of cool things like this:

I hope you can use this idea! I would love to hear if anyone has another awesome idea for student gifts! Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think! 

Signing out

Emily