Teacher's Gift - Wordle with students thoughts

When my kids are preparing to sing the old song "No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks" I struggle with what to give their teachers as year end gifts. I personally try to avoid traditional teacher's gifts like mugs or pens or even gift cards. I will admit I do use gift cards as my last resort because I know teachers spend so much of there own money to stock their classrooms and this gives them a little to spend on themselves.

This year my daughter had 2 new teachers so they both got my Name art. I think this will be an annual tradition for all her teachers. My son on the other hand, will always be two years behind her with the same teachers; therefore, I have to think of new and exciting things for them.

So for my son's teacher this year, I asked permission to talk to the kids in his class one morning while they were signing in. I asked each of them to give me three words or phrases to describe their teacher. Some struggled a little bit but with come guidance, they all were able to give me something . Some were really cute, like "I like her hair" but most said what they felt in their hearts (just like 4 and 5 year old kids do). 

Note: In case you were wondering what the blurry gap was in all of the images, I blurred out the name of our school. 

I typed every word the kids gave me (even the repeats) into a word file. I then went to the Wordle site and created a new Wordle. For those of you who don't know Wordle, it is a free program that creates word clouds.

A few tips when entering the words into Wordle. In order for there to be a space between two words, use the ~ symbol. So for "I like her hair" I had to enter "I~like~her~hair". If you enter a space, the words will appear separately.  Every time a word appears/is entered, the word get larger in the cloud. In other words, the larger the word, the more times it appears in your word file. So I entered the teacher's name the most, followed by the school name next.

I copy and pasted all the words the kids said into the 'create' page on the Wordle site and selected 'go'. Wordle creates a custom word cloud with a random design. The best part is, you can customize almost every aspect of design, including the background, fonts, directions the words appear, etc. The possibilities are endless.

One thing I do not like about Wordle (or perhaps I haven't figured it out) is you cannot save the image as a jpeg or giff. I had to print the file to PDF in order to save it.

I color printed the file on photo paper and framed it in an 8x10 frame.

I love that it is personal to the teacher and gives her an amazing perspective of what the children think about her.

I realize this is too late for you for this year, but perhaps it might be something to do next year. My kids teachers know I write this blog so I didn't want to ruin the surprise.

What do you think?

Stephanie
Linking to some great parties including: Story of A2Z