Word Cloud Creations

fun ways to use word clouds in the speech room

This week I discovered my new favorite thing: using word clouds for speech goals! If you've heard of Wordle before, this is similar. But I had problems getting Wordle to work on my Mac, so a Google search for alternatives led me to ABCya - and it's great! It's geared towards kids, easy to use, and creates your word clouds in fun colors and fonts. (FYI, the entire ABCya website is great fun and full of awesome reading and math activities for K-5 kids)

As opposed to Wordle, which makes more frequently used words appear larger, ABCya makes the first word you type into the list the largest word in the cloud. After you finish typing your list, you can play around with fonts and colors and layout. You can also save and print your creations. (Quick Tip: if printing be sure to change the colors to black on white.)

So what did we make with our word clouds? I'll show ya!

Articulation Practice Clouds: We made the target phoneme the largest, with practice words surrounding it. For some students working on carryover, I typed words they produced correctly in conversation into the word cloud to show them how awesome they are doing! *BONUS: print for built-in take home practice!*

Narrative Language Story Clouds: We typed the name of the story in first, with those story grammar elements surrounding it. Now when they retell the story, this serves as a visual reminder of what needs to be included. Sometimes we colored or crossed off the elements as we talked about them.

Word Clouds for Language Goals: This one we typed in a category first, then students needed to name as many items as they could think of that would fit into that category.

Describing Word Clouds: We typed in a noun and thought of describing words that were appropriate for that noun. Which led to...

...students thinking of kind words to describe the friends in their group! I love it!

Leave a Comment: How will you be using word clouds in your speech room?